


Entangled

by WolfSpider



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Age Difference, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-15 17:56:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17533448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: Kingpin's collider did more than just open a door to other worlds: that first failed experiment mixed all the Spiders' atoms together, and now Miles finds himself involuntarily jumping, torn across universes by the magnetic pull of friends he's become attached to on a quantum level. Which would be fine, if he didn't maybe want to be a little bit more than friends with one specific Peter Parker.





	1. The Principle of Locality

**Author's Note:**

> Once again I've ignored the obvious sequel tease in favor of doing something less convenient with dimensional travel.

The second time Gwen Stacy got sucked with inconsiderate abruptness into the dimension containing Earth-1610, she didn’t slam face-first into the mocking smile of a Times Square billboard. Instead she fell with a spray of dippin’ dots lights and a muffled _oomph!_ into Miles’ bunk, right on top of him.

Having a cute girl drop on him out of nowhere, literally into his bed, wasn’t as thrilling as Miles might have assumed in his guilty adolescent fantasies. He coughed the wind back into his lungs while Gwen tipped her way over the edge of the mattress and off the top bunk, landing en pointe with all the grace of a cat that had fatally injured its dignity. Ganke, two Monsters deep into a caffeine binge past midnight and distracted by death metal, didn’t even look up from his desk.

“Hey, Miles,” Gwen said, tipping her hood back. “Got a minute?”

\---

Peter’s New York was just different enough to be weird, and just not different enough to feel different. It was the little things that stuck in your head, tiny nagging imperfections, differences that lodged in the mind and irritated like a splinter slid fully under the skin. Like one of those Spot the Differences puzzles in the back of an issue of Highlights for Children: find the staircase with one more step in it between these pictures, the corner store with two faded advertisements plastered across the front windows instead of three. Landmarks subtly shifted a few doors down from where they were ‘supposed’ to be, shuffled around at random; new marketing campaigns for sideways familiar soda brands, all of it still in the same living color.

Somewhere in this New York, it was strange to think, there was another Miles Morales. At seven-ish in the evening, Other Miles was probably sitting down to dinner with his family-- no, it was a weekday, more likely he’d be grabbing something cheap and lukewarm from the Visions caf and smuggling it back up to their room with Other Ganke. Unless, of course, without the catalyst of a certain spider’s bite, they’d never become friends-- unless Other Miles still went to Brooklyn Middle, Brooklyn High that fall. Other Miles had homework. Other Miles had a sketchbook filled with designs that might be different, spilled forth from a mind that might have developed from unforeseen circumstances in unaccountable ways. Perched on a stranger’s fire escape in an alley he was pretty sure no one would chance to peer down, Miles contemplated how weird it would be to run into yourself on the street, a voyeur peeping into your own life.

But back up a moment.

There was a strange buzzing all over the surface of his skin, a hypertension like all the atoms that fused him together were jangling anxious against each other, and had been ever since the rift had opened between third and fourth periods and vacuumed him up into somewhere else. _Rift_ was what Gwen was calling it, and that felt right, felt apt; a temporary hole punctured through the skin of reality, and beyond it that great dark tumbling void he’d glimpsed in the abyssal depths of the collapsing Alchemax Collider, crosshatched with strands of some ephemeral thread that stitched all the planes of possibility threadbare together. Looking into it, he hadn’t been able to imagine what it would be like to fall through that spiraling space, pulled forth by whatever force called like to like matter, the spider singularity.

He knew now. It was beautiful and terrifying and stopped his heart in his chest, made him quiet and small, just for a second. Then the moment of hanging equilibrium had passed and he’d been spit out stumbling, on his feet thankfully, on the gravel and pigeon shit encrusted roof of a squat brownstone building in somewhere that approximated to Chinatown. The bracing gust of an early April breeze blasted him in the face and out of his brief shock, but even when he’d strolled down the side of the building and gotten his bearings on solid ground the whole thing had left him on edge. Spontaneous dimensional travel would do that to a person, probably. The sample size so far was small.

Miles had been Spider-Man for about four months. About three weeks had elapsed since Gwen had blinked into his world, into his room, and then on a whim evaporated again. _The collider did something to the fabric of reality_ , she’d theorized at him, both of them perched on a broad steel strut propping up the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge, sipping coffee from fair trade eco-friendly cups in relative privacy as they listened to cars and trains rattle along above their heads. _Or at least, our reality. Tangled us up together, maybe, unless someone found a way to make another one--_

So Miles had kind of, in the back of his head, been expecting it. Or anticipating, like you might hold your breath about a looming pop quiz in a difficult subject with an uncertain date. _It might not happen again,_ Gwen had said. _Or it might happen tomorrow._ In any case, when she’d disappeared without fanfare or apparent cause a few days later it had neatly solved the problem of how to send her back before all her cells decayed to ash. Whatever the half life of foreign particles in a new universe might have been, Miles never wanted to find out.

He wondered, vaguely, if Peter knew Other Miles, or if this was even a universe with a Peter Parker in it at all-- but he felt, and had learned to trust such inexplicable out of nowhere deep gut feelings, that it was. For all the ways the air here was alien to him, the feel of the early spring sun against his skin had a familiar quality to it that went down bone deep, a comforting known quantity. Maybe Peter had saved his copy from a mugger once, a routine heroic altercation so rote and regular that Peter would never have remembered his face. Caught a glimpse of him on the subway, in civilian mode, and had the same sort of disorienting moment that Miles had every time he saw Spider-Man memorial footage on some news or entertainment program back home, that flash of disbelief and unrecognition: _that’s not Peter Parker. That’s a stranger wearing something almost like his face._

Miles tapped out a beat against the brickwork and hummed indistinctly while he googled Peter’s name on his phone, infinitely grateful that even though cell service sometimes dropped out on the ferry for no reason, it apparently worked between universes. The first page of results included a Linkedin profile that hadn’t been updated since 2014 and several articles from the Daily Bugle’s online site listing a Peter B. Parker as photographer or coauthor. One of them (“Masked Menace Gums Up Midtown Traffic in Sticky Scuffle”) had a slightly blurry picture of the man in question at the bottom, buried beneath links to more relevant stories and an ad for Burger King. Miles hissed his breath out between his teeth. There was the messy hair, the big crooked nose, the scruffy five o’clock shadow. A face he’d thought he’d looked into for the last time in the seconds before he’d dropped the man into the chaos and color of the collider.

It was, for real, _that Peter_. Miles felt his heart make a deep slow thud, becalmed.

From Uncle Aaron, he’d picked up more than his fair share of street smarts: where to go if you couldn’t go home, who and what and which places to avoid, how to get a good meal or live on a little. Miles didn’t really need to find Peter, he had options of chilling and exploring B-Side New York until this phase was over and he could return to regular life, but he wanted to, despite not knowing quite how he wanted to find him. The hope was for a nice solidly middle-class row house, soft sterile interior decorating with no two-days-discarded empty take out containers in sight, pretty wife back at his side with maybe the signs of a baby on the way, or at least the signs that they were trying. That’s what he’d pictured, whenever he’d let himself get curious about Peter’s self-controlled destiny. That’s what they’d both wanted for him.

But Miles, whose life was upended drastically and permanently in the span of about 48 hours last December, knew that all it took was a hot minute for everything to change. There was every possibility that the Peter B. Parker of this universe would now be as unrecognizable to him as the blond straight-nosed, straight-laced stranger who had died too young to teach him the trade; thinner and well-washed and clean shaven, and someone else’s problem. Then, too, there was every possibility that the inertia of old habits had caught him in the grips of his holding pattern, and four months would have changed nothing at all. Privately, in his own head, Miles wasn’t sure which option disquieted him more.

It was getting dark slowly, twilight spreading itself across the cloud-choked sky, and the breeze was stiffening again, and a cold oozing rain had begun to fall. Thick droplets splashed ponderously across the backlit image of Peter’s face and Miles pocketed the phone, the image burned into his memory. If he was here, and for now he was, he would make the most of it, even if the idea of seeing Peter again sort of made him feel, for some reason, like an old car on a chill day, ready to shake itself apart.

\---

Gwen stayed with Miles for a few days, because she had to, and between a couple of team-up patrols and hiding her from the faculty administration they chilled. It was chill.

What Miles had expected was to want her, with that sweet burgeoning directionless want that had swollen incipient under his skin that first time, a full-body ache. Like the flu, it made him sweat, and that hadn’t been so long ago in the grand scheme of things. Maybe something about fighting together, though, taking her hand and promising it was as friends, ruined it-- he saw Gwen in his room that night, full up on the awe and precious surprise of seeing someone he’d thought he’d given up, half in shadow from his erstwhile roommate’s computer screen, and she was like the sunshine, warm and bright and whole. But he wasn’t like a sunflower for her anymore, didn’t open and wilt by her smile or the flip of her hair, didn’t track each of her motions across the room with such a yearning need.

Some strange alchemy formed the science of love. That spark caught tinder, burned itself out, and having eaten through its fuel could not be rekindled the same way, nothing to burn but ashes there. In different terms, the longform chemical reaction had been completed. What was left was a gratitude, a fondness that suffused him; a new thing, not an absence, a friendship without pressure. He relaxed, and she relaxed, and they talked and laughed and she traced the veins spidering blue beneath the thin pale skin of her wrist, searching for signs of interdimensional decomposition.

“Sorry,” Miles had said. “It sucks that you’re here like this. But I’m glad we got the chance to hang again.”

She’d smiled at him, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. It wasn’t growing out again on the other side; she’d clearly buzzed it down again recently, downy peach fuzz against the side of her skull. “Me too,” she’d admitted, and added, “but next time you have got to come to my place,” before he could stick his foot in his mouth somehow and ruin it.

Instead, at the capricious mercy of the universe, Miles found himself scuttling up the rain-slick side of the modern style building that housed the print offices of the Bugle, peaking in windows to see if he could catch a glimpse of Peter. There were easier and less conspicuous ways of doing this, probably. As a child he’d had a police scanner in his room and spent long nights listening to the chatter, hoping to hear the soothing sentorian rumble of his father’s baritone voice roll across the coms; easy enough to listen in awhile, head for the first major disaster that came over the wire, and wait for Spider-Man Classic to show up. That method relied on hope and faith and an ability to predict Peter’s behavior that Miles didn’t yet possess, though, so up the skyscraper he went. At least this plan felt like direct action.

It wasn’t as though he were leaping in blindfolded, either. The closer he’d gotten to the building the more it had throbbed against his consciousness, a localized pressure that beckoned like a flare. Each floor up made the fine hairs down the backs of his arms raise, that sensation pushing at the web of instinct and perception that made up the spider sense with an insistence that let him know he was on the right track. The curious shiver of recognition unfurled down his spine again and again, opening into the pit of his belly when, twenty storeys up, hands sliding against the great slabs of glass paneling, he caught sight of what was unmistakably Peter through the wet-smeared window.

He was sitting at a desk cluttered with the paraphernalia of a hectic working life, papers and newspapers and chunky overfull manilla folders piled at angles across every inch of available space and also the top of a boxy decade out of date computer. Several glossy enhanced photos of Spider-Man were tacked up above the desk. The light inside the office was warm and low and showed off a slumped-over silhouette that was maybe a little slimmer, a jaw still fuzzed with the furze of stubble; a heavy olive green coat that was rapidly becoming unseasonable hung from the cheap back of a highly un-ergonomic plastic rolling chair.

The spider sense flared up one final time and then burned down, and Peter’s head snapped back around towards the window at the same instant that Miles chose to knock, knuckles clunking a dull reverberation into the glass. A moment of incomprehension spread across his face before his brown eyes went big and wide and his caterpillar brows furrowed. Miles just grinned through his mask, trying to play it cool and not wave at him too frantically, keeping his excitement at a simmer while Peter mimed his way through a series of increasingly frenetic hand gestures of his own, a game of Charades where the answer was probably “this window doesn’t open, holy shit how are you here, meet me on the roof in five minutes”.

The wind was worse on the roof, this high up, and the gentle spring rain had turned entirely unforgiving. At least he had the suit on to insulate him, though he rolled the mask up over his eyes when he heard the metal clang of a door slamming open on its hinges and Peter’s boots (two of a pair this time, no longer hobo fashion) splashing through growing puddles. His cheeks were flushed ruddy and his voice had taken on a sort of breathless quality, like he’d bolted a few flights of stairs too quickly. “Miles?” he called, not waiting for a response before striding over, long legs closing the distance with loping ease. “How-- are you okay, bud? Are you in trouble?”

“Naw, man,” Miles said, unable to keep his smile from widening. It wasn’t so long ago that Peter wouldn’t have cared-- but it had been long enough that he might have forgotten the way he felt for Miles, the fondness and the pride in him, and a final tension eased. “I’m good. Just taking a day trip, thought I’d drop in and see how you were doin’.”

Peter snickered, in that dry half-helpless way that meant he was cornered, and ran a trembling hand through his hair. “Guess we’ve got a lot to catch up on.” He rolled up a sleeve to check his watch, shrugged. “Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere. Want to blow this joint and get dinner?”

Miles’ stomach churned in response. He shrugged back. “I could eat.”

\---

An hour and two train rides later (the weather having been firmly classified as too shitty to swing through, and thank god money was the same in this dimension, because Spider-Man didn’t hop turnstyles let alone Officer Davis’ son) Miles found himself in a cramped hallway you could have set a convincing horror movie in, dripping rainwater onto mysteriously stained grey-beige carpeting while a single naked light bulb flickered frantic morse code at them. Broad arms bulging around take-out bags loaded up with warm dim sum and noodles, Peter shuffled stuff from hand to hand and under the crook of a creaky elbow enough to get the key in the lock, and kicked the door open with a smack. “Welcome to Chez Peter,” he said, dropping the paper sacks onto the apartment’s lone table. “If I’d known you were coming, I woulda dusted off the good China.”

They could’ve eaten at the restaurant, a bustling steamy hole in the wall under a stretch of elevated train track where voices called out in snatches of at least three languages and paper lanterns bathed the low fake-lacquer tables in soft red light, but Miles had argued for privacy discussing hero stuff. It was a pretty obvious cover for just wanting to see Peter’s apartment, which it turned out there hadn’t been a real rush on. An inventory of Peter’s continuing living situation was this, itemized: obscenely bare mattress, flat on the floor. A window that looked out at a cracking brick wall. No couch, just an aging cathode ray television sitting on an old orange crate before the bed. A stack of carelessly piled cardboard boxes containing personal effects perhaps no longer relevant to the person he had become, and a cork board beside the window where thick threads of red yarn tied suspect to suspect by push pin, solidifying the invisible connections of crime and purpose and suspicion. A framed picture of a redheaded woman Miles assumed must have been his MJ, not much different from the widow he’d once seen on the steps of a church. And on one wall, something mundanely, shockingly familiar.

Miles sauntered over to it, transfixed, while Peter unrolled the folded over mouths of the bags and unpacked segregated boxes of rice, beef chow mein, general tso’s, a translucent rice paper packet full of lumpy cheese wontons, chattering away as he worked. The decoration on the wall was a sticker. One of _his_ stickers: _Hello, my name is MILES._ He recognized it as one he’d kept loose in the pages of his sketchbook, presumed lost in a flurry of loose pages when he’d chucked it streetward out the window in a fit of despair. Fat curvaceous outlines, bright sunny yellow highlighter, a new style he’d been trying out for a tag. _Hello, my name is MILES._ It was there on Peter’s wall, somewhere his dad would _never_ be able to find it.

Like it was special. Like it was something Peter wanted to see, and remind himself, and remember.

“MIles?” he heard Peter call again, as if from a long way off. He was holding a selection of utensils out to him, still wrapped in their flimsy paper and plastic wrap restaurant-grade casings. “Fork or chopsticks?”

Whatever weird personal moment he’d been having broken up by this ordinary sort of question, Miles blinked and brushed it off. “Chopsticks, for sure. Who do you think I am?”

Peter tossed him a packet of sticks from across the room, and there was still a small marvel, a glancing novelty, in being able to reach out and pluck them from the air without even thinking. Miles tapped the end of the packet against his thigh to rupture the paper with the pointy ends and peeled the wrapper the rest of the way off while Peter inelegantly portioned out the rice onto paper plates, the aroma of grease and MSG wafting through the air, filling the whole space with something other than the scent of dust and black mold behind the walls. “Alright, alright,” Peter said, put upon with half of a grin flickering across his face. “Just giving you options.”

Miles wondered if Other Miles would have gone for a fork, if that was the kind of decision that made a difference at all. “I’m good,” Miles assured him, snapping the sticks apart and using them to grab a golden fried glistening piece of chicken from the top of an overstuffed open box.

Peter watched him eat for a second, then turned away, inhaling three bites’ worth of fried rice at once. “That’s a good break,” he said, muffled, mouth full, and Miles glanced at the fat ends of his own chopsticks, smooth without splinter or off-kilter angle where they were snapped. Clean, crisp, centered. “I never have that kind of luck.”

“It’s not luck, man.” The chicken made his mouth fill up with water for another bite, and he went for a dumpling that time, smooth and savory. “One hundred percent skill.”

Peter cracked open two glass bottles of Coke for them, still frosty from the refrigerator, and Miles let it get warm in his hand as he explained what had happened with Gwen, what had happened with him. There was only one chair, and Peter leaned against the grimy kitchenette counter slurping noodles in unusual silence, taking it in. “Quantum entanglement,” he said after a while, spraying crunchy wonton crumbs down the front of his shirt, and Miles nodded.

“Yeah. Like that thing Kingpin did, with the collider-- it got us all mixed up with each other, one big multidimensional particulate system. Uncontrollable dimensional warping.”

“Great.” Peter snorted, phlegmy, and took another pull off his Coke, wiping the residue from his mouth on the back of one big hand. “Are you holding up alright? Have you started glitching out yet?”

“Not yet.” Miles shook his head, hesitated, pressed on through his doubt. “How you doin’, though?” He glanced from the bed, to the boxes, to the TV, back to Peter, who grunted from the back of his throat.

“Work in progress.”

“Yeah? How ‘in progress’ are we talking here?”

It occurred to Miles that he’d never really seen Peter in his natural habitat before, in clothes he’d chosen and a place that was his. He’d changed out the borrowed sweat pants for jeans, which he apparently wore to work, and a plain white (off-white, with age) t-shirt under a rumpled red button-down that he’d left unbuttoned. There was a pressed charcoal grey suit hanging above the apartment’s rickety radiator, and it seemed like he might have run a comb through his hair at some point in the last week. All of this was encouraging, at least he was trying, but the positive signs were tempered by his general air of scruffy disheveledness, and the punched-out bags under his eyes, and the exhausted slope of his back.

“We’re talking again,” he said.

“Hey, that’s a start.”

“I don’t think it’s--” Peter bit that thought off at the edge, swallowed it down with another swill of soda. “Whatever. We’ll see. This stuff takes time.”

Miles tried to reconstruct the awkwardness of that first conversation, the apologies and the promises to do better that may have fallen a bit flat; pictured Peter showing up at his ex-wife’s door with a fist full of fresh flowers wrapped in foil paper, in his suit and tie and matching shoes, hopeful and hangdog and wanting, and the implied rejection of their surroundings settled over them. He wished he could give Peter some better advice, but him and MJ were probably well past the swaggering Shoulder Touch stage of a comfortable relationship-- even if Peter could probably do the “Hey” way better than Miles could, maybe almost as good as Uncle Aaron.

They watched The Late Show on the edge of Peter’s sad bachelor bed, full of heavy food and still cracking through a pile of fortune cookies, snorting at the empty platitudes (“You learn from your mistakes… You will learn a lot today!” “The secret to staying healthy is to eat more Chinese food.”). “D’you care if I crash here?” Miles asked during a commercial for Planet Hollywood. His phone told him it was almost half past midnight.

Peter tossed his head towards the window, where it was still raining. “You think I’d let you go out in that? Get real.” So when they were out of cookies and television had started to cycle into late-night reruns, Peter wadded up some old shirts into the general shape of a pillow and struggled out of his overshirt, laying himself out on the floor with his jacket as cover.

“You don’t have to do that,” Miles said. “There’s room up here.” ‘Up here’ being relative; there was only about ten inches of difference.

“It’s fine,” Peter said, shifting around from back to side to other side, trying to arrange his crooked back and out of alignment shoulder blades in a way against the scuffed wood floor that wouldn’t leave every joint a screaming point of welded-stiff pain in the morning. “Next time I’ll invest in a pull out couch or something.”

_Next time_ made Miles’ insides flutter with that same queasy anticipation.

When the lights were off, Miles lay out flat on the mattress and listened to the rain and Peter’s breathing as it slowed and carefully began the work of dissecting everything he felt, hot and cold and tender. He was annoyed with Peter for still being here, he realized, for having stalled out, for not having made up with MJ and closed off forever a possibility that Miles would have preferred to have an excuse not to examine. Between the broken springs and the lack of a box frame the bed was only nominally more comfortable than the floor, but the sheets and the pillows smelled like Peter, not in a gross stale way but something living, like being wrapped up in him.

He was annoyed at himself, too, for having missed Peter in the way that he had, like the body might miss a vestigial organ once removed; nothing vital, nothing he couldn’t go on without, but an empty abscess all the same. He didn’t feel nervous about being here, or getting home, even when the first of the fracturing seizures rolled him and woke him before dawn, all sharp and jagged crunching between muscle fibers and in his gut, this universe attracting and abhorring him all at once. Peter was-- a friend, and comfortable in of himself, and they looked out for each other. He didn’t need a father figure, or another uncle, or even an older brother, but their bond was something different from that. It was something elemental, written now into every spinning atom of who he was.

Whatever happened was going to happen, the spasms of the universe would not be directed or controlled. All Miles could do was roll with it, when it came.


	2. Superdeterminism

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've modeled Ganke in this fic after a combination of comics canon (particularly the new run of Miles Morales: Spider-Man) + things I've seen the Spiderverse crew say on Twitter + the like two seconds of him in the movie + my own hopes and dreams.
> 
> Everything I know about quantum mechanics I learned from Wikipedia.

Miles crashed back into his own universe like a hardboiled egg into a brick wall, dizzy and aching and nonplussed.

\---

Here was a thing that Ganke Lee now knew about Miles Morales: he was, and had become, the once and future Spider-Man, and Spider-Man was totally awesome.

Here were some things that Miles Morales now knew about Ganke Lee: he liked green tea lattes and Code Red Mountain Dew. He did not like the taste of taurine, but he’d put up with it well enough to go through a full case of Monster or Rock Star in twelve hours the night before a big deadline. His need for sleep in general was catlike, liable to nod off against walls and face down on his desk mashing a line of gibberish into a word processor with the side of his cheek as he drooled on the keys, but back up again to undo it all in under five minutes. He liked Joan Jett and Childish Gambino and tolerated Miles’ affection for Post Malone with friendly bafflement and the requisite amount of light teasing. He was probably one of the coolest people Miles knew, and that put him in pretty stiff competition.

He was also, almost definitely, a genius.

“Okay, run that by me again,” he said, leaning back in his cheap Office Max roller chair, putting his sneakers up opposite on Miles’ desk. Miles was fine with this. The Visions dorms were too cramped (his mom would say ‘comfortable’) to not get used to being up in each other’s faces all the time, especially accounting for clothes and books and science projects and stereo equipment and all the other paraphernalia of being a teenager.

Miles cracked the tab on a limited edition can of Red Bull from the one bodega in Midtown that sold that particular flavor, still ice cold from the cooler (sometimes web-slinging had its advantages), and passed it over it him. Ganke took it one-handed, shifting his computer around on the tops of his thighs and punching in a few keystrokes with the other paw.

“You recording this?” Miles asked.

Ganke looked at him over the square rims of his glasses. “Top secret, dude,” he promised. “I’m just gonna take some notes.”

The thing was, Ganke wanted to be there, at Visions-- and he’d _always_ wanted to be there. He had his life planned out to the letter: notably three letters, MIT. And then CERN, working on that other collider he swore up and down would never have actually blown a black hole through the fabric of spacetime, trying to unravel all the most intimate secrets of the nascent universe. He didn’t just like math, in the way that an artist didn’t like raw paints; arithmetic was a tool, a medium, and one he was good at manipulating to get at the heart of his actual interest, the structure of everything. His entire dissertation, the one he routinely stayed up past dawn drafting and refining, was on that very same topic.

So Miles’ practical applied knowledge was a rich seam of data for him to mine, and Ganke was a valuable resource for grasping at the straws of what might really be going on with his wayward atoms; the transaction was mutually beneficial. No real need to have plied him with high octane sugar in special seasonal flavors that they didn’t seem to sell anywhere else in New York. And also, of course, because Ganke was his best bro, a bond forged in the sharing of secrets, and friends don’t let friends hop universes without a copilot.

“Okay,” Miles said, took a breath. It would be easier to draw Ganke a picture, maybe, scope out the scattered Jackson Pollock splashes of color in the dripping acrylic he saw in his dreams, but most scientists weren’t visual in quite that way. It was hard to satisfyingly quantify subjective experience, but even harder to put a data point on the representation of a feeling, on art. “So it’s like… okay, it kind of made me feel like a hooked fish, like there was something tugging on something inside of me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Flipped my stomach like a roller coaster.”

“Hmm.” Ganke pecked in shorthand at the keyboard. “What was it pulling on?”

“Just like, generally pulling. All over everything.” Miles crossed his arms over his chest where he sat perched opposite Ganke’s feet with his legs over the side of the desk, trying to recall every fleeting, dragging instant of being siphoned up through the Rift. “It also sorta made me feel like I was dissolving.”

“Gnarly. Did _that_ hurt?”

“Nope.” Ganke was staring, his silence doubtfully accusing him of bullshitting.

“For real! It just kind of felt… I don’t know. Fuzzy? Fuzzy around the edges. Like the reception on my body was bad.”

Ganke chugged half his drink and set the can aside to focus. “What were you doing before you, uh, left?”

“Algebra homework. Can’t say I was too broken up about being interrupted.”

The keys clacked for a long time. In the low evening light Miles could see the boxes of various program windows with too many tabs open reflected in Ganke’s glasses, portals into their own worlds. “What was _he_ doing?” he asked after a bit.

Miles blinked. “Who, Peter?”

“Schlubby hobo Spider-Man, yeah. You said it was his place, right?” Miles tended to forget that Ganke had met, or at least seen, as many alternate universe Spider-People as he had, but though the introduction had been brief it had apparently burned itself into his memory. Someone with a carefully numbered and indexed collection of every copy of True Life Tales of Spider-Man ever printed was bound to take a continuing interest.

“Yeah. He was at work.” Miles thought about it, thought about the rain and the wind and the Daily Bugle building. “Nothin’ major happening. We got dinner.”

“What dinner?”

“Is that, like, significant?”

Ganke shrugged. “It might be. You don’t know what’ll turn out to be relevant until you’ve got all the information in front of you.” Now it was Miles’ turn to facially insinuate that he was bullshitting. Ganke shrugged again. “Or I’m deciding whether to make you bring me back interdimensional shrimp lo mein next time.”

“It’s not like going around the corner for take-out, man,” Miles groaned. “That’s kind of the point.”

“I know, I know.” Ganke grinned. “Just messin’ with you. But for real, I do think what Hobo Parker was up to might wind up having some relevance.”

Miles raised a skeptical eyebrow, once burned. “Yeah?”

“You know anything about quantum mechanics?”

“The thing they use to talk long range in Mass Effect? Sure.”

“And that’s junk sci-fi science. Or it isn’t!” Ganke threw up his hands, jostling the computer from his lap and nearly unseating it. Miles kept a wary eye on the laptop in case he had to make a last second dive for it while his friend was too distracted to keep it stable. “We’re in a strange new world of strange mechanics here. Your little field trips between dimensions have pretty much blown established physics all to hell anyway.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose where they’d slipped in his excitement.

“Me and Gwen talked about it,” Miles said. “I’ve got enough of the theory.”

“Theory nothing-- it’s not supposed to work like this, you know. Sure, stuff gets entangled on a subatomic level so that particles in a system are inextricably linked across space and time, a change in one reflected in the other, but between dimensions? On a macro level, affecting entire organisms? Get out. Unreal. Not supposed to happen.”

“How would I have even gotten entangled? I’m not a Peter Parker.”

“Neither is your girlfriend,” Ganke said, and Miles barely had time to splutter out a “She’s not my--” before he was pressing on. “This is a kind of philosophically uncomfortable guess, but it doesn’t seem to me like Kingpin’s stupid, brilliant experiment just caught on Peter Parker. Seems more like it grabbed Spider-Man.”

“What, as a concept?”

Ganke snapped his computer closed, apparently done with taking dictation. “If you want to put it another way, maybe it’s fate.”

“Come on,” Miles protested, rebelling against the idea of someone as practical as Ganke believing in something as ephemeral as fate. Maybe it came from believing as hard as possible in thirteen flavors of quarks and a universe of strings vibrating with their own celestial music. Then again Miles had seen some of those threads up close, even if none of them were heartsblood red. “That’s some shoujo manga garbage, Ganke. Pretty sure Hobo Spider-Man isn’t my soulmate.”

“Who said anything about that?” Ganke slurped the other half of his Red Bull at him loudly. “Sometimes people are just put in each other’s lives for a reason. Like an evil dude the size of a Mack truck playing god. But hey, you do you, get down with all the alternate universe time clones you want.”

Miles tried very hard not to think about the smell of Peter’s skin against the sheets, warm and real and comforting. “We are so far off track,” he said.

“You want my advice?” Ganke asked, pulling back from radically offroading this conversation. “Pay attention to _everything_ next time you jump, if there’s a next time, even the stuff you think isn’t important. On a quantum level, even observing a system can shove the whole thing out of whack. If we can figure out what the trigger is, maybe we can figure out a way of avoiding it.”

Supposing, anyway, that Miles really wanted to.

\---

The second time Peter B. Parker showed up unannounced in Miles’ dorm room (now located in the high school half of Visions Academy) happened a whole long sweltering summer break later, in the first week of a September that baked until the asphalt sizzled and unattended rubber seemed to glisten in the sun. He’d let himself in through an open window that Miles and Ganke could only wish housed an air conditioning unit and hunkered down on a middle rung of the ladder that connected their bunks, flipping lazily through the first collector’s issue of All New Spider-Man with the holofoil alternate cover. There was a sweat stain sticking the back of his thin cotton t-shirt to his skin.

“Hey, kid,” he said, grinning sheepish and lopsided as Miles dropped his heavy backpack onto a chair. Whoops, how embarrassing, slipped dimensions again. “Sorry I didn’t call ahead, I couldn’t grab my phone before… you know. Do you realize there isn’t a single payphone left in New York? Not anywhere! They’re an endangered species. What are you supposed to do if you can’t afford a family plan, send a telegram?”

“Peter, you sound like my Dad,” Miles said, falling into it with disconcerting ease. As if he’d just talked to Peter last night, instead of almost five months ago.

“He sounds like a distinguished gentleman with good opinions about phones.” Peter tossed the comic onto Ganke’s bottom bunk where it sprawled itself messily open to reveal a splash page of a black-suited Spider-Man socking a badly drawn furry in the stomach, and Miles let himself get a look at him. Five months hadn’t upgraded him much, though he’d swapped the jeans for cargo shorts that showed off his strong, coarsely furred calves; maybe it was hot on the other side that week too. The bulge of his gut was still pronounced over the waistband, so he was technically staying in shape, just not in the shape he’d intended. And there was a certain shadowed quality to him, indefinable but haunting, that made Miles’ mouth pull into a shallow frown.

 _You don’t know what’ll turn out to be relevant._ “Is something up?” he asked.

Peter slithered off the ladder and brushed down his shorts before sticking his hands in his pockets, thumbs hooked over the hems. “Bad time?” he said, with the inflection of a question he knew the answer to. “I got you. Lots of stuff goin’ on. You’ve probably got homework--”

Miles had crossed the room and caught his sleeve before he could more than half-turn back towards the window. “I’ve always got homework, doesn’t mean I can’t hang.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” Peter quipped, like that wasn’t a big deal either. “Thought I’d check in on you, see how the gig is going. Folks are liking the all-new Spider-Man, huh?”

“I’ve got an Instagram,” Miles said, fishing his own phone out of his oppressively hot felt uniform jacket and pulling up a video of himself doing a handstand on top of one of the Chrysler Building gargoyles. He was rewarded with a smile that seemed equal parts delighted and exasperated and genuine. “Lotta social engagement. I’m a man of the people.”

“Networking. Smart. I used to publish a lot of selfies too, before print media choked itself out and died. That was kind of the opposite of a good PR move, though.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, my old boss hated vigilantes. If I had a nickel for every _Spider-Man: Foe Or Menace?_ scare tactic story I wound up illustrating, I’d almost be back above the poverty line.”

Even with the ceiling fan running the air in the room was stale, and so close to another living body it was warm enough to be intolerable. Miles shrugged his jacket off and tossed it over the rail of his bunk, feeling overdressed in his smart starched shirt. “If you want to see how the job’s going, come out with me tonight,” he said.

“Like a ride-along! Or maybe a swing-along.” Miles huffed out a breath of laughter even though it hadn’t been funny, and wondered what he was doing. “Sure, bud. Let’s see the man in action.”

“Great,” Miles said. “And until the sun goes down, you can double check me on Pre-Calc. The other Peter was a graduate student, what’s your excuse?”

Peter groaned. “Lack of upward motivation?” But he was already pulling out Ganke’s empty chair and swiveling it around so he could lean his arms forward over the back, like they were about to start rapping on the dangers of texting and driving or the devil’s weed. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Miles showed him.

\---

It was still hot after the sun had mercifully shut off, steam rising from the grates of sewers and storm drains as they hopped from roof to roof, enjoying slicing through thick air on the pendulum arc of each shot of web. The suits various Peters had designed were breathable, but skin tight and still humid, wicking away sweat.

For as long as he could remember, Miles had loved to run. He’d never been at home in his body, too lanky and gangly and uncoordinated with awkward exuberant youth, but the tight-strung burn of it pulling in calves and thighs and the hard fast breath scraping his lungs open raw had made him feel alive. Gaining power and balance and composure had added a new depth and texture to it; instead of just skipping across curbs he was taking whole streets at a bound, jogging at a ninety degree angle hundreds of feet above ground and then launching himself, sneakers pedalling through empty air. No danger, just physics, calculated split-second on the fly by instinct and the feel of it alone.

The only downside to that exhilaration had been that, by necessity, it had been a solitary pursuit, no one to share the joy of unfettered motion with. When he went for a run now it was across the canopy of the city, sharing space with the birds-- and now with Peter, the only person who could hope to keep up. His style was different, all the power in his wide shoulders reminding Miles that despite the junk food and the TV binges he was still strong, banded muscle like steel cable cording his arms. Peter didn’t like to run, didn’t bother building up momentum, just tripped off the lip of each gutter or plaster crenelation and let gravity sort him out, less inelegant about it than such an approach might have seemed at first blush. There was no technique to how he moved, just the art of long practice, carelessness born of confident ease.

Miles spent more time watching Peter than watching the streets, and called it research.

“What was your routine, when you were starting out?” Miles had asked him back in the dorm, getting ready to go out on the town. Suiting up had been a leisurely affair, though Miles had practiced until he could do the whole process and have his civilian clothes secured somewhere out of reach with a blast of webbing in under two minutes, and Peter had spent a very long time in the tiny freshman bathroom, came back half in half out of costume with the front open to reveal the left chest of his t-shirt underneath, mask rolled up above his mouth. Miles hopped on one foot to pull a boot on and tried not to fall over.

Peter shrugged. “It was pretty easy to let trouble find me. The city was _bad_ back then, Miles, even without super crime. Mostly I just kind of swung around, jumped off tall stuff, let people see me.” He zipped up the suit, let it plaster smooth over the planes of his chest, the legs of the spider embracing him. “This job-- it’s all just symbols. People need something to believe in, or be scared of. You don’t let ‘em see your face because it’s safer, sure, the kinds of criminals we bag would just as soon knife your grandma if they thought it’d give them leverage over you, but also because when you’re Spider-Man, you’re not a person. You’re not you, with all your hopes and dreams or whatever. You’re there for _them._ ” He swept an arm out towards the still open window that spilled car horns and night noise in from the streets with a humid breeze.

“So you’re saying the Instagram was a really good idea.”

There was that crooked smile again, the real one, for a split instant before Peter smoothed the mask down over his mouth and disappeared into Spider-Man. “Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”

What Miles had sort of meant to ask was, _Did you ever enjoy it?_ but the sentiment got stuck in the back of his throat. What he could see as the evening wore on, the two of them just patrolling, aimlessly swinging around the city in search of excitement, was that Peter seemed to loosen up little by little the longer they were out, losing a certain stiff tension around the shoulders, getting reckless and relaxed with his aim and his timing, but they weren’t out to be seen. Peter, who was supposed to be dead, couldn’t. So they stuck to the shadows and the squat buildings and the back alleys, and they moved fast, and Peter was a shadow of his shadow, always trailing in Miles’ wake, which felt wrong.

Around ten-ish they stopped for hot dogs off a street vendor who complimented their costumes (“Very authentic! That’ll be five bucks. Each.”) and took them all the way up to the Brooklyn Bridge to eat in peace, scaling the cables and the cement to the highest perch possible, the flat top of the stonework. Miles sat crosslegged and peeled the foil back from the bun, remembering the dull impact of Kingpin’s blunt fist against the back of his skull, mortar crushing against the side of his face. Last time he’d been here the bridge had been rising out of a kaleidoscope of architecture, and Wilson Fisk had been trying to kill him.

Miles bit into his hot dog. A landslide of hot vinegary relish slopped out the opposite end onto his chest.

“You’ve got a little… right there,” Peter said through a bite of questionably processed meat, gesturing at the general area.

“No big,” Miles told him. “Black’s a good suit color. I never even have to wash this thing.”

The harbor was wide and dark and went on forever, a galaxy of shimmering lights floating on the water, and it ate their silence whole. “For real, man,” Miles said after a while. “What’s up with you? How’re things going with MJ?”

That probing was more invasive than tentative, and Peter made a face like Miles had jammed a finger into an open wound and twisted. “Let’s not talk about that,” he firmly suggested.

To be fair, Miles wasn’t entirely eager to talk about it either. “‘Kay. What else?”

There _was_ something else, he felt. An unusual cagey quality to the way Peter sat, a distance between them that had increased inversely the nearer they edged together on the platform. The spider sense was a magnetic aura, and like magnets, something about the energy he put off was pushing against Miles tonight, pushing against everything, trying not to stick too close. He saw it in the way Peter’s shoulders hunched defensively, crumpling in on himself. It was there in the way a muscle twitched convulsive beneath Peter’s left eye before he turned back to the water and crushed the hot dog wrapper into a dense compacted ball, pulling the mask all the way on before he was even finished chewing.

“Nothing,” he said. “You already know the rest.” Peter clapped a hand on Miles’ shoulder and rested all his weight there for a moment, using him as an anchor to help drag himself back onto his feet. “Listen, it’s getting late, I know you have curfew so I’m gonna bounce. Gotta at least pretend to be a good influence. Thanks for dinner.”

“You have _got_ to start carrying your own cash.”

“No pockets in the suit, it’s a curse.” Peter gave a mock-salute above the blank eye of the mask. “Catch you around, Spider-Man.” And then he fell backwards off the bridge, leaving behind hot dog refuse and the residue of tensile-strong web fluid clinging to the mortar and a throbbing star of pride and irritation beneath Miles’ sternum.

“Good talk,” he told the wind and the sky and the wide, empty harbor.

\---

He’d had a lot of summer to think about Spider-Man.

Being at home, keeping the secret by himself, had been different. When his mom was working the graveyard shift (always a morbid designation at a hospital) and his dad had night patrol, there was nothing simpler in the world than to sneak out-- it required no real sneaking. He could have gone out the front door if he’d wanted to, spider suit and all, and met only an indifferent population of evening people with their own business. On days when everyone was home the difficulty ratcheted up, the kitchen full of nostalgic spice smells and laughter that already seemed a little distant, belonging to another childhood time now slipped slightly into the past. The weight of everything he wasn’t saying sat centerpiece between the three of them on the dinner table, an adornment politely unacknowledged.

Disappearance had been a secondary fear that throbbed at him, sustaining a jittery fight or flight adrenaline high for three full months that sometimes had him blending into the walls like a chameleon without realizing. It was one thing to dodge disappointed phone calls from his father chastising him for “cutting class” and reminding him that his status with the school put him on thin ice for indiscretions, and another entirely to give the appearance of walking out on his family during those three months. He’d spent a lot of time outside as a kid, hanging with the other neighbors, shooting hoops and talking shit, but he’d been a good boy. He’d always come home.

In the small hours of August nights, exhausted and keyed up reprocessing a scuffle with a selection of ski masked muggers with sharp knives and blunt fists, listening to his mother moving ghostlike through the kitchen to unwind her own stressful shift with coffee and cream, Miles thought about Spider-Man, turned the feeling over inside himself, letting it become familiar. In his own bed, the soft warmth of that was no different than in Peter’s. _I love you, I’m so proud of you_ rumbled through him like thunder at each flash of recognition, and it came back to him again trying not to drift off in the middle of English Lit with the sea spray off the East River still riming his lungs with salt.

It seemed to Miles that Peter had been right; even for them, who knew better, there was the split dichotomy of Spider-Man, powerful untouchable hero, and the vulnerable human thing they were beneath. Peter B. Parker was a wreck, was the rusted hull of a wreck that had burned out years ago and languished. There might be no salvaging him, except for parts. But the best parts of Spider-Man, the parts that were brave and funny and determined and _good_ , didn’t come from nowhere. Miles wished deeply that Peter could have come crash with them last night, laughed at off-model comic book paneling and talked shop about quantum fields with Ganke until the sun came up to check on them again, but he understood without putting a name to it why he couldn’t.

He just also wished he knew where Peter had gone instead.

At almost midnight, after floor security had done the rounds of room checks and then gone past another time for good measure, Miles tapped Ganke on the shoulder to let him know he was going out and crawled from the window back into the city’s hazy orange semi-darkness. Last night had been a bust in terms of busting criminals, and every time he went a long stretch without a catch it started to itch at him, like he wasn’t pulling his weight. _Weight? You’re like what, a hundred pounds soaking wet? Cut yourself some slack!_ said a voice in his head that sounded like Peter’s, but he couldn’t help it. All the nefarious plans of rotten people didn’t stop because he was still in training. People were relying on him. Relying on Spider-Man.

He skirted Prospect Park and the edge of the borough, toying with the idea of crossing up to Manhattan and the East Village, maybe taking some pictures with one of the panhandling Times Square Spider-Men. New York was a big city, oppressively, overwhelmingly big, and all of it was his range, but Miles was and would probably always be most comfortable in Brooklyn, where the streets knew his name.

Three blocks south from campus his blood was up and he was feeling good-- not worrying about Peter, where he was or why he hadn’t stopped by at all that day, even if he was even still in this dimension. He swung past the window of a discount electronics store where Harry Osborne’s head was talking on a dozen differently sized TVs, pinballed himself off the roof of a stalled out Toyota, and darted into an alley chasing a snatch of peripheral movement that turned out to be one of New York’s omnipresent handbag-sized rats.

Trying to get a read on an angle for a good anchor point, Miles looked up to find that someone else had already had a similar idea. A skin of synthetic webbing stretched from the cast iron rail of an aging fire escape to sturdy brick on the other side, the belly of the makeshift hammock swollen with unseen weight. Someone’s arm dangled over the side, limp and corpse-like, swaying gently from side to side as if rocked by the body or the wind. Tuneless mumbling strains of a familiar song drifted down on the currents of the soup-thick night air.

“Needless to _say_ mm-hmm nn uh--”

Miles grinned against the restrictive cloth of the mask and hummed along with him until they got to the part of the chorus that rose as a crooning howl, voices blending together, and Peter almost flipped himself out of his hammock scrambling at being discovered. “Miles! Uh, hey. Hi.”

“Didn’t know you liked my music,” Miles said, radiating smugness up at him.

Peter glowered defensively. He did, technically, have the high ground. “It’s catchy.”

“Yeah, I can see it caught you.” Miles took the wall at its perpendicular angle and strolled up along a rusted drain spout, coming up roughly on Peter’s level. “What’re you doin’ up here?”

“Trying to grab some sleep,” Peter said. “I left my wallet at home too so it’s either this or a Central Park bench, and those things are murder on my back.” He sat up, scratched at the scruff of his neck. His eyes kept sliding off of Miles, away from him, finding fascination in his own hands or the blocky green dumpster below.

“This where you went when you bailed last night?” Miles asked, looking at him sideways. “Sad, man. Why didn’t you go to Aunt May’s?”

“It was late.”

“You think she’d care?”

Peter hissed a warning breath out through clenched teeth. “Miles--”

“No, come on.” Miles clambered up beside Peter, feeling the webbing stretch and strain and dip beneath them precariously, but hold. His hand was close to Peter’s, skin to glove, until Peter slumped forward to balance his weight against his knees through his elbows. “I’m just trying to say, you’ve got options. Your midlife crisis doesn’t have to extend to sleeping in gutters.”

“Miles,” Peter tried again. “Stop.” And the bluntness of it, the ring of iron like the taste of blood in the back of the throat that echoed in his voice, made Miles stop. “I’ve been here for like half a week, actually,” he said. “I didn’t look for you at first because I kind of just wanted to be on my own, and then I didn’t, and then I thought it was a bad idea.” Miles swallowed back the hurt of the implied _you were a bad idea_. “It was-- Aunt May, my Aunt May, died in the summer, three years ago.”

“Oh,” Miles said, winded.

“Yeah. I was… Jesus, why I am I telling you this. I was in Queens on Monday for a work thing that turned into a _different_ kind of work thing, and I wound up going past the old house… They repainted it, redid the porch, cut down the tree in the backyard. I didn’t recognize it. It was like looking at the same house in another universe, and then I was in another universe, here.”

Like that, Miles was back in Uncle Aaron’s apartment for the last time, after the lawyers and the shiny yellow tape and the small family-only funeral. He was feeling himself there, looking at the neon electric raspberry blue tiger painting and the soft-backed couch and the shelves full of records in their paper slips as people came and took things away, piece by piece, dismantling a life. He was holding a clockwork plastic lucky cat in his shaking hands, watching its paw go up and down, up and down, waving goodbye.

He put a hand thoughtlessly on the small of Peter’s back, and felt the shivers of a big man wanting to weep.

“When she died, every bad thing happened to me,” Peter said. “And it was all my fault. Aunt May, she was a hard lady, she kept me straight. I didn’t want her to-- have to look at me like this, again.”

“Because it would be hard for you, or hard for her?” For a moment Miles was afraid that question had been out of line, but at last Peter exhaled, a huffy breath that was almost like a laugh. “I wasn’t ever like her nephew,” he said. “When I was 26 I was selling pictures of myself to the Bugle to pay off half a Microbiology degree I never got because my professor turned into a giant lizard and tried to bite my head off, and then the next semester my _other_ professor grafted robot arms to himself and tried to blow up half the city.”

Miles tried to picture where he wanted to be at 26, maybe in a loft apartment with a bigger drafting table doing his own comics between pieces of commissioned corporate art to pay the bills. It all seemed so far away, and so far in Peter’s rearview mirror now that it was intimidating. “You’ve seen some shit, huh?”

“Language,” Peter rebuffed him mildly, mock scandalized, and Miles socked him lightly in the upper arm.

“Whatever.”

“The point is, I don’t know her,” Peter told him. “I don’t have a claim to that house, and I don’t have a claim to this other guy’s aunt. He wasn’t me.”

And Miles remembered something else, Peter Blond Parker standing on top of the collider, panting, his voice echoing through the cavernous space: _I’m tired._ “He could’ve been,” Miles said.

Destiny.

\---

They took the late bus across boroughs, hollowed out and exhausted. Peter took the window seat and let his heavy head nod against the glass, unbothered by the shocks rattling over potholes with the diameter of a dinner plate. His ghostly reflection showed deep lines across his face, pepperings of grey in his dark chestnut hair, and Miles observed him soberly, asking himself, _is this really what you want?_

The balls of their shoulders butted up together as Miles leaned back in the bolted-down seat with its late nineties blue and purple upholstery patterned in exuberant geometric shapes, and he knew that it was.

Where May Parker lived now was a smaller house, sublet, half a mile from the demolished urban wreckage of a quiet domestic home that had become a battlefield. The insurance had paid out settlement enough for her to comfortably pack up and replace her things, move them into a tall skinny brownstone on a sleepy thoroughfare beside a flowershop. Miles had helped her move, or at least helped her load up the truck, a woman who let her frail appearance be deceptive, and she'd let him cart away a few boxes of his own, spare suits pressed and folded, gallon bottles of precious web fluid.

He and Peter spent what seemed like a very long time looking at the door. "You gonna, or should I?" Miles asked.

The sun wasn't coming up yet, but the sky had taken on a fuzzy pre-dawn periwinkle around the edges, slowly warming up for the day. It was either very late, or very early, and either way this excursion was inappropriate. It wasn't the house that Peter had grown up in, wasn't even a copy of it, and this May was someone else's aunt.

Peter took a deep, shuddering breath.

He pushed the button.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh yeah, there's gonna be a lot of time skips in this fic.


	3. Hidden Variables

When Miles finally found out what exactly an egg cream was it both delighted and somehow slightly disappointed him to realize it bore little resemblance to the nog-like product he’d expected, more of a tall and fizzy chocolate milk. Likewise when he finally saw Noir’s true face beneath the mask he was surprised and then surprised with himself to find it familiar, the same slanted brow and large nose and floppy hair that was endemic to Peter Parkers accented with thick-lensed glasses that made him look more unassuming and, in a way, more severe.

1939 was, predictably, a dire, dour time to visit, and Noir (after he’d been appraised of the kind of fiction that moniker would come to signify and approved of it, Miles would never be able to think of him as anything else) had much to be severe about. The streets were dirty and smelled of smoke and ash in a smog that spread itself thick as cake frosting beneath a choked sky, and neon blazed bright starlight white above the bars and movie houses of the city. Noir took him up to the balcony of one such baroque theater “to get an education”, and they sat through a newsreel featuring German tanks advancing into the outskirts of Warsaw that Miles could have sworn he’d seen in World History four months ago during the World War 2 unit before _Dodge City_ with Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan started. Noir’s eyes, already and by definition dark, had gone stony behind the mirrors of his glasses.

“That’s a brewing storm Roosevelt’s a fool for not battening down against,” he growled in a stage whisper like crunching gravel. He’d respectfully removed his fedora when they entered and laid it in his lap, and his thin white hands were knuckles and bone crushing the stiff felt of it furiously between his fingers. Someone in the row in front of them turned around and shushed at him.

“If it makes you feel better,” Miles said, more quietly, “he will. America’s gonna get into the war.” He remembered the real pictures he’d seen in textbooks, grainy black and white showing bleak bombed-out moonscapes, piles of rubble that had once been homes and theaters, bodies stacked like boards; the glorified full-color images recreated for future, higher definition movie screens and the consumption of a populace hungering to touch some scrap of a bygone wartime glory that spackled over all the very real suffering. “Not soon enough, but it’ll happen. You’ll get your shot at some Nazi punks.”

Noir only grunted, but he did pass over the grey and white striped paper packet of toasted peanuts they’d picked up at the concession stand, and he stopped strangling his hat quite so hard.

\---

That was later in September. By the time the weather had turned bitter and biting and winter came around again Miles had started to slip into a new routine, or maybe just a different state of mind, no longer on tenterhooks about the possibility of dimensional jumping but ready to roll with any surprises that came.

Determined not to be caught unaware and stranded in a strange space without supplies, he’d started to put together what he thought of as a Bug Out Bag (“Hey, it’s punny!”), a smallish canvas messenger bag just adequate and unobtrusive enough to be useful and carried on his person at all times, always in range and easy to grab in case of emergency spatial displacement. It had all the essentials-- phone, suit, granola bars and beef jerky, clean underwear, a jealously accrued fifty dollars in cash --and some other stuff, metal and lithium devices heavy as black holes that Ganke claimed might measure the waves between worlds, a set of delicate glass vials with cotton swabs and a clear gelatinous agar base to encourage cellular growth. “Get samples,” he’d said, shoving an armful of stuff at Miles. “Biological material especially. It’s important.”

Miles tried picturing himself sticking a q-tip in Peter’s mouth, or Gwen’s, to get at the soft inside of a cheek, and calmly decided that he would rather die. But he took the stuff along, what of it would fit without breaking, all the same.

The bag became comfortable against his right side between ribs and hips over several months, but saw no use, and Miles put his head down and did his work, and his extracurriculars, and ate dinner at home on Sundays, and tried to make up for the days he’d missed as part of a living history project and the sleep debt he’d wracked up showing Peter B. all his favorite stake-out spots. Just when he was beginning to let his guard down again, examine with regret and relief the possibility that the whole thing might be over, the ground opened up beneath him between third period and lunch and he went head over heels with just enough time to be annoyed that he’d be bringing not only his supplies but a stack of textbooks he hadn’t ditched in his locker yet with him.

It was cold again in Peter’s New York, a place he recognized as grey and drab and washed out-- not in the way that Noir’s world was, like a late-night rerun of I Love Lucy, but in an intensely regular sort of way, unlovely reality smacking him in the face without all the vibrant color of home. Miles found himself on a subway platform, none of the hustling lunch hour businessmen in their scarves and suits and pea coats paying any mind to the boy that had just walked out of a wall, and he mentally shrugged and made the best of it, walking to the other end of the station to get on the train that would, circuitously, take him down over by Peter’s apartment. The stops were numbered just differently enough here that he wound up overshooting, only noticing that he’d just missed where he’d meant to go when the doors were already closing, but the detour didn’t really matter, anyway.

The air stung at his exposed skin and the water in his eyes as he hiked over to the apartment, sneakers crunching through slush darkened by a crust of car exhaust. Miles shivered in the cramped foyer of the building where the peeling linoleum flooring was smeared with the leavings of ice-mud from tenants’ boots and he shivered up the rickety stairs with the scuffed wood railing and he shivered down the creepy hallway to Peter’s door, stretching up to pat around the top of the lintel in search of the knot of artificial cobweb Peter had said hid a spare key he’d left just for Miles, if he ever needed it. His fingers felt arthritic grasping the icy sliver of metal.

He shivered in the apartment, too. It was dark, and felt like it had been dark for longer than just the morning; there was a deep, settled cold in the small room, and the ancient radiator wasn’t going. Miles stepped out of his shoes and regretted it, feeling like his stocking feet were going to flash freeze to the floor as he shuffled over to crank the valve. While he waited for the iron to warm up and hold its heat he blew on his hands, adding gloves to the list of things he needed to throw in his pack for the future.

Miles wondered what he was going to do if Peter just wasn’t there. Hang out and watch television and eat his food, maybe. There was a bag of mealy potatoes and half a gallon of souring milk in the fridge and a box of Spidey-O’s in a cabinet that mice had been nibbling on, and Miles definitely didn’t want to go outside again for anything else. There was also a small brass menorah set up on one side of the kitchen table nearest to the window, two skinny blue and white candles adorning its branches, and Miles briefly considered lighting them to help heat the apartment up before deciding it sacrilegious. Just the thought of it made a part of him warm, thrumming in his chest with the thought that Peter had the energy to celebrate something on his own, that he’d apparently wanted to at all.

With all the impatient unhurriedness of waiting for a pot to boil the apartment slowly transitioned from intolerably frigid to merely cool, and when Miles could no longer see each puff of his breath given form in the chill air he finally began to relax. He stretched out in Peter’s messy bed for a while, flipping through channels filled with daytime soap operas, low rent nonsense for the easily bored, and then decided he wasn’t _that_ bored and let a C-list quack celebrity talk to the room about the Paleo Diet while he inspected Peter’s wall of cardboard boxes.

There were fewer of them than there had been previously, and the apartment was starting to look lived in again; still not like a home, but at least like someone lived there, and had decided they might be living there for awhile. Shirts and pants had been unpacked and moved to the shallow closet. The triangular pizza grease stain had been scrubbed from the ceiling, leaving the other brown stains of blooming water damage that Peter could do nothing about. The rest of the boxes were just stuff, things a person accumulated and then couldn’t stop hauling around, knick knacks usually left in drawers to languish forgotten and dusty, but possibly useful and therefore unable to be thrown away.

Miles sat on the cold floor and eased the lid off of one, sifting through it judiciously without really feeling like he was snooping. He was helping, he thought. This wasn’t the season for spring cleaning, but Peter had been here already for who knew how long, and the clutter wasn’t going anywhere on its own. The box he’d picked was mostly papers, primarily papers, cuttings from news articles old enough to be jaundiced and brittle. A stack of photographs held together with a paperclip. Some of the clippings and pictures were framed, but most were free floating, the ones that had escaped their feeble binding adrift in the bottom of the box. Miles spread them out like tarot cards in rows across the floor, examined them for insight into Peter’s past.

The majority of the pictures were of other people, as if, having spent much of his working life photographing himself in different exciting locations and poses, Peter hadn’t wanted to bring that energy home. There were old pictures taken with bad cameras of Aunt May, younger and darker haired, and a man with a kind face that Miles didn’t recognize, and there were a lot of pictures of Mary Jane. MJ at someone else’s kitchen table, copper hair curled and ruffled from sleep, a shaft of golden morning light illuminating her embarrassed, laughing smile at having been caught unaware. MJ in a warm summer backyard, cradling the world’s fattest cat like a baby. MJ in her wedding dress. It was obvious that even if Peter had sort of unintentionally fallen backwards into his career he’d become good at it; there was a tender artistry to every shot, framed with love.

The picture that had once sat beside his mattress, a simple 3/4ths portrait, had been put back in the box.

Miles shifted past it to examine the other frames. There was a wedding portrait from his aunt and uncle’s ceremony; a picture from Peter’s high school graduation where his face was freckled with acne but he smiled broadly, pointing at the valedictorian sash around his shoulders. The last thing in the box was a framed newspaper clipping dated almost twenty years ago, featuring a picture of a slimmer Spider-Man holding a round-faced child in his arms. _Masked Vigilante Saves Five From East Village Fire_ , the headline proclaimed. Peter’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.

Footsteps scuffled outside the door and tripped Miles’ spider sense fiercely, his heart jumping into his throat as he hurried to pick up the pictures without folding or creasing anything. Peter shut the door behind him and his expression moved from tepid exhaustion to genuinely pleased surprise as he shrugged his coat off, throwing it over the back of the lone kitchen chair. “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

Guilty and playing it off, Miles stuffed the box back into a corner. “‘Bout time you showed up,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

Peter kicked the compacted snow from the soles of his boots against the door frame. “Gwen’s,” he said shortly, which set off a twinge of nostalgia. “Just got back.”

“I haven’t been here long,” Miles told him. “What’s up with her?”

“Her band had a gig,” Peter said. He clomped over to switch off Dr. Phil without actually removing his boots, leaving them alone in the apartment. “Dunno. We didn’t talk much.”

Miles didn’t need a cork board and red thread to connect the dots from the Gwen Stacy he knew to her Peter, but from Peter’s voice, clipped and reserved, he felt there was a whole half of the picture that was invisible to him, like the perspective from behind Peter’s camera. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said after an awkward beat, too earnestly, redirecting them away from the cliff’s edge of that pain. “I was gonna go stir crazy if I had to just hang out the next few days by myself.”

A moment passed where it looked as though Peter wanted to say something, but instead he said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re here too,” and the ice in his voice had thawed, and he sounded like he meant it.

Peter went into the tiny cubicle bathroom and ran water for a while, and came back fresh shaven with a wet fleck of Barbasol still clinging to the corner of his jaw. The light coming in through the window had gone a hazy orange and though Miles had realized several months ago that he no longer really needed a lot of light to see by before everything started to become indistinct grey shapes in the dark, he turned a lamp on for them all the same. The sunset reminded him of an earlier thought, and when Peter was done cleaning up he gestured towards the table. “Happy Hanukkah, by the way. You want to light some candles?”

“Depends,” Peter said, rubbing at his newly smooth pink chin with a nervous hand. “Do _you_ want to?” and when Miles answered instantly _yeah, for sure_ he fished a box of waxy candles and a sulfurous packet of matches from a drawer beneath the kitchen counter that rattled with stray pens and knives. He reset the display, placing four candles right to left below the single tall fat one to account for the days he’d missed, and then hit a succession of three damp matches against the rough strip of strike paper until one finally caught long enough to light the big candle. The sun was low. They turned the lamp back off.

Miles took the chair and watched him dip the big candle to the other wicks, multiplying the single flame into five small stars. Peter’s words were low, too, and halting, like he was unsure he was remembering them correctly. “ _Barukh ada Adonai Eloheinu_ ,” he said, replacing the large candle. Many small flames could make a big light, and in the twilight darkness of the apartment they carved half his face into shadow along the plane of his long-broken nose. “ _Melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner Hanukkah..._ ”

It reminded Miles a little bit of being in church with his mother, and a lot not like that at all; only that the solemn reverence of the chanting called down some pall of something sacred, and made him quiet inside and reverent as well. He wondered if Peter believed in it or if the tradition was the only thing for him, a way of remembering. The blessing went on for a while, and then the only light was the tallow as it slowly burned down, and Peter coughed into his fist.

“What now?” Miles prompted when it seemed like the lingering moment was over, curious.

Peter shrugged. “I’d give you a gift, maybe, if I had anything on me. Sorry. Shoulda brought you back a souvenir from the other Earth.”

“I don’t have anything for you either,” Miles said. “Except, you know, the gift of me being here.”

“I’ll take it,” Peter laughed, and Miles laughed with him.

Another thought stirred, and Miles stood up so quickly that the chair legs squeaked against the floorboards. “One sec,” he said, returning to the hastily resealed box to retrieve what he’d wanted. He came back with the framed newspaper clipping in hand and passed it to Peter, the firelight reflecting the man’s face in the old glass over Spider-Man’s mask.

“Wow,” he said noncommittally. “Haven’t seen that in awhile.”

“I found it when I was, uh, cleaning,” Miles said.

“It’s okay, you can say ‘snooping’. This is a safe space for nosiness.” He stroked his thumbs over the wood framing and handed it back to Miles. “Some good classic Spider-Man action.”

Miles held the picture on his lap. “Since you didn’t get me anything, can I have it?” he asked.

Peter’s eyebrow went up, but he kept any skepticism tamped down. “Sure,” he said. “That stuff’s all just old junk anyway. You’d probably be doing me a favor.” Grinning, Miles found a slot for the frame in his bag with the granola bars and the money, all the important stuff.

After half an hour had passed Peter blew out the candles and checked the time on his phone. “Want to start on dinner?” he asked, and Miles, remembering the mostly cobwebbed larder and suspect milk, asked, “You cook?”

“Not usually, I could call out for pizza. But I was thinking we could do a holiday thing, since you seemed interested.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’ve got the stuff for latkes, I think.”

“That’s, like, fried potatoes and stuff, right? I’m in.”

The potatoes, two eggs, and a wilted onion Miles hadn’t noticed were taken from the fridge and Peter found a mostly-full box of matzo meal behind the cereal. “Cut that down as small as you can,” Peter said, handing Miles the onion and a knife.

“Giving the guest the annoying job, huh? I see how it is.”

Peter brandished a silver box grater at him. “You can do the potatoes instead if you want, I hate peeling those suckers.” Ultimately Miles opted for onions, and ignored the sting in his eyes in favor of concentrating on the musculature of his hand moving the blade, the soft _shiff, shiff_ sound of potato scraping away to a pile of flakes. Growing up he’d cooked a lot; after school when his mother had gotten off a twelve hour shift she would sometimes enlist his help and they would work together, chopping vegetables with a much blunter knife than this under her hawkish supervision, browning meat, Rio naming all the spices for him as she added them one by one to steaming, simmering pots or rubbed them into the slick pink flesh of chicken sliced into long strips. For Miles, the sounds of knives on cutting boards and oil coming up to splattering heat, the smell of meat frying-- that was what family was.

Maybe it was the same way for Peter, too. “This was my Aunt May’s recipe,” he said into the comfortable quiet, and Miles put down his knife to circle his fingers around Peter’s upper arm and squeeze tightly.

“Come over to our side next year,” he said. “We’ll all cook together.”

“Next year,” Peter promised.

They tossed together the potato shavings and the onion, pressing down and pouring off the water, and then cracked in the eggs, the matzo, the baking powder, and what even without experience Miles was pretty sure was probably a half a stick of butter too much. Peter told Miles to mix it even and fired up the hulking gas range stove, lifting down a sturdy blackened skillet and pouring a generous measure of oil in. When it was hot and Miles’ arm was tired they dropped in dollops of batter measured in uneven spoonfuls and let it sizzle golden brown on one side. Miles tried to show him how to flip them with his hands, the same way he flipped tortillas at home when he was trying to be tricky, but Peter just wound up biting back half-formed curses under his breath and sucking at the blunt tips of his fingers blistered hot.

“One _hundred_ percent skill,” Miles said, waggling his own fingers at him, and flipped each pancake perfectly.

The recipe made more latkes than even Peter, whose wide stomach was bottomless, could put away in one sitting; they piled their plates high with stacks of the fried discs and Peter served them with sour cream and pepper and smoked salmon from a can that was dry and oily and savory. “It’s good,” Miles told him appreciatively, on his third bite. “You should cook more often.”

“Usually I don’t have anyone to cook for,” Peter said, on his third latke, and this time Miles decided to let the persistent question about MJ be. She wasn’t here.

All that mattered was who was.

\---

It was after midnight and snowing back home, when he got there, but snowing gently, fat wet flakes, and at least it was warmer; it had to be warmer to snow, or at least warmer than it had been. After the hard winds and insidious cold that had reached down into the sponge of his bones, anything above zero felt humid.

The snow came down, a drifting broad-strokes oil painting snow, and the snow and the dark light made the city seem like a silent movie, muffled shushed traffic sounds coming in from very far away. Orienting himself in his mental map of the island was difficult when he wasn’t seeing it from above, but he picked a direction that he thought would probably take him towards the Park Avenue subway station and walked, in no hurry to get anywhere. His walk took him past the looming Gothic arches and towering spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, dormant and sleeping now, where once he had seen Mary Jane Parker deliver a speech for her husband’s death, and without really meaning to he veered off the sidewalk, through a gate and up an ice-slick path to the graveyard.

In about a week or so every evening news program would be running compilation footage of Peter Parker, remembering the man and his work one year after his death, his image inescapable. The simple, humble gravestone would again be piled high with candles and balloons and flowers, offerings to one of New York’s protectors who had paid the final cost. Miles looked down at the stone and felt the breath in his lungs and wondered if this Peter would like some of the latkes he’d packed in a Tupperware for himself, if he’d been Jewish, and if so if he would have wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery or if things had just sort of happened that way--

Peter would want some latkes, Miles decided, unpacking them. They were good regardless, for everybody.

“Thank you,” he said. How had it already been a year? “I’m sorry, Mr. Parker. You shouldn’t have had to die. I wish I’d known then what I know now.” Miles shifted from foot to foot in the snow, watching his breath rise like miter smoke. The silence opened up around him, expectant and patient, and in the metropolitan gloaming of street-light trapped and insulated under winter clouds Miles felt the memory of Peter’s hand on his shoulder through the cheap imitation costume, on a night like this not really that long ago, the warm pressure of another body in his space. He could see the stone through his own hand and he held very still and faced it until his heart slowed and swelled and he was visible again and he could face himself, alone with the shape of the truth in his mouth.

“I love you,” he said, to someone else, confessing it, letting it unburden him, sharing the secret with himself. “Just maybe not the way you meant.”

Miles went home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've now caught up with the stuff I had 80% prewritten longhand before posting that mostly just needed to be typed up so I have no idea what my update schedule is going to look like going forward, but I'm going to get this done god damn it.


	4. Naturally Entangled Systems

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been staring at this for three days and I'm tired of looking at it, take it away from me.
> 
> This fic is sort of structured into two broad arcs, so here's the start of that second half. Now I'm going to hibernate for a week.

For Miles’ seventeenth birthday he called his mother and made plans to eat at a new Asian fusion restaurant in the neighborhood over the weekend, and then he helped Ganke break into the Visions chem lab. It wasn’t incredibly difficult; the building was open all hours for the kids who wanted to get an extra leg up on classwork and there were always a few wandering down the lower halls for the library, looking for a quiet place to do their heavy reading undisturbed. They wore their uniforms and carried bookbags and tried to look innocuous, which Miles, with Peter for model and mentor, had never quite gotten good at.

It would have been easier to go by himself, slink invisible down two staircases and across the courtyard where they sometimes ate lunch in fair weather, venom shock the keypad lock on the big glass laboratory door so it short circuited and popped open, and do whatever needed to be done. But as Ganke had said, they were in this heist together-- “This is for you, dude, but it’s also kind of for me. Let me have it.” So they both went, and Miles kept look out while Ganke snapped on a rubber glove to avoid leaving fingerprints and punched in the code for the door, which was a precaution Miles largely felt would be unnecessary. Nobody would bust them if they didn’t make it obvious that some impropriety had been committed; they weren’t going to take anything or break anything or leave a mess overturned behind them, so it would be just fine. Probably.

Private school facilities were the real deal, Miles had to admit. The science department for the high school was expansive, taking up an entire floor, and housed banks of computers that looked like they’d been lifted out of some CIA bunker. Some things, like polished sterility and cartoony safety posters, were ubiquitous across campuses though. A plastic skeleton with all its joints held on by wire grinned at him mirthlessly from the corner of the room Ganke had wanted, swaying back and forth slightly in the chilly current from the ventilation system.

Ganke unzipped a powerful microscope worth more money than Miles’ father’s car from its shiny black plastic body bag and plugged it into a bank of outlets on the lab table. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s do this.” And he handed Miles a fresh cotton swab and a blank glass slide. The timing was crucial; it was just good luck that Miles had come back from the future that morning, his head still full of the sights and sounds of Peni’s own lab and his cells still full of the particular interstellar radiation that made other planes anathema to his atoms. Miles ran the cotton tip around the inside of his cheek and smeared it on the glass before handing it back to Ganke, who carefully clipped it into the bed of the microscope.

“Remind me again what you wanted to get out of this?” Miles asked.

“I wanted to observe the cellular decay in action,” Ganke said, already peering through the lens and twiddling various dials to enhance and sharpen the focus. “The glitching is getting worse, right?”

Miles looked back out the door, into an empty hall plastered with advertisements for the student union and posters entreating him to sign up for Model UN. It seemed like the aftershocks of the last spasm, the one that had ripped through him like a spitting electric current slightly before he’d jumped back, were still vibrating down his arms hours later, raising the fine hairs there with crackling static. He could picture himself fracturing, blood sizzling in his veins, nerves a network of fire screaming at his helpless animal brain that something was catastrophically wrong but not able to find or fix the source of the hurt. Most of it didn’t seem worth remarking on. “Yeah,” he said.

Ganke whistled, low and almost impressed. “Yeah. There’s a _lot_ of decomp.”

“I don’t always feel this bad, though,” Miles said, and wondered why he was arguing, what point there was in automatically defending a callous impersonal reaction of elemental physics. “Once I’ve been home for a few days, it’s fine.”

“Sure, okay, right now,” Ganke said. Between glances at the slides he was making notes and sketches on a ream of binder paper. “What happens two years from now, though? Five? Ten? What about the rest of the Spider Gang? Peter B. doesn’t look like he could withstand a strong wind sometimes, let alone the prolonged strain of universe hopping.”

Miles wondered why every conversation they had about the subject seemed to circle back to Peter, eventually. He profoundly regretted introducing them. “I know it’s not sustainable,” he admitted. “I just don’t know what I can do about it.”

Ganke tapped the spine of his notebook with the hollow end of a ballpoint pen. “That’s what we’re gonna find out.”

\---

A week later Miles got hurt, really lastingly hurt, on the job for the first time.

It wasn’t a blood and bones kind of injury, no fractured jagged-edged chips of femur poking out of the ruined muscle of his legmeat while dark arterial blood fountained from the wound in pulsing jets or gash in his side spilling out slick entrails. No crushing, no blunt force trauma. All in all it was a hurt he should have been able to walk off easily, but it stayed, seeping down into the structure of his body until the thorns of the pain became a permanent feature, twinging whenever he moved wrong and accidentally scraped up against it.

He was in the harbor shipyard following up on a hot tip he’d traded a sandwich to a homeless man for about a shipment of vibranium-alloy weapons coming in under the radar from China, a deal brokered by the crooked arms dealer the underground people called The Vulture. Presumably because he made a living off of waiting for things to die in order to pick the corpses clean of their spoils, and also, as Miles found out, because he chose to literally fly around in a jumpsuit and jetpack with wings, which was undeniably, hypocritically tacky but at least made the culmination of a long, spring-damp stake out more interesting.

Unlike Spider-Man, the Vulture didn’t work alone. Men in matte black kevlar that ate the light from the bright eyes of flood lamps with serious guns in their arms and at their hips marched as shadows between palettes of rectangular corrugated iron shipping containers stacked like drab wooden blocks with the malicious confidence that only men with guns could have. They moved like wolves with a singular hunter’s intent, spreading out their prowl to meet the ship as it came in, tall prow splitting the night-dark water into lapping white froth. A horn moaned, mournful and searching.

Miles watched their procession from the high extended arm of a crane, planning out the best play-- whether it would be better to go in now, stick them up one by one before the whole pack of them would be in a position to jump him at once, or whether he should wait on it long enough for the transaction to go down and ruin the whole thing more effectively. He squinted one eye and lowered a hand in the direction of each anonymous thug, making a _thwp!_ sound with tongue against teeth under his breath to try out the feel of it, raring to go. His thighs were cramping from crouching motionless amid the steel rebar slats for endless boring hours.

A smear of green-black motion blur to his right and the belated whisper of _danger_ that shivered across his periphery like a cold breath at the back of his neck announced the Vulture coming in from the south, wings tucked in close to his body to fall as he dived with owlish silence, the whir of hydraulics and motors dampened, plunging like a stone through still water towards the great docks. Miles saw his opportunity and gladly took it without hesitation, bounding onto the balls of his feet and loping down the thin metal runway the crane made for him. With a single fast glance he found his anchor point, extended his arm, tapped the button, and sailed out into empty space, legs extended.

It was all a matter of vectors and angles, simple instinctive math that he felt in the long sense memory of his bones, and Miles was _good_ at math. His boots intersected with the arc of Vulture’s drop at the precise point where they would smack into the man’s sharp shoulder, and the jolt of impact was impossibly satisfying, the look of bug-eyed surprise and fury behind his goggles. It was satisfying for a full three seconds, anyway, until Vulture twisted his body into the inertia of the blow and snagged a long-fingered hand around Miles’ ankle, tugging him down with him. The full line of Miles’ body snapped taut between his webbing and the new weight, spine hyperextended, and the sudden crack of pressure distributing itself wrenched something in his right shoulder blade high and wide and _wrong_. Not dislocated, he could still move it if laboriously, but something deep and important torn loose.

Miles cried out, more in surprise at the pain than the pain itself, which he was used to. In three years he’d taken black eyes, bloody noses, jammed fingers, sprained ankles, spoiled sickly bruises, ribs knocked out of place, the disappointed searching glances of a suspicious father, and he’d always just shaken himself off and kept going, maybe with a little Neosporin and gauze in the bathroom mirror to patch it over. He’d taken his punches, enough punches that he knew how it felt to be slugged by a hand with a ring on it and a hand without, how to roll with it to soften the blow, how to turn and twist himself to avoid an enemy hitting anything sensitive or vital. He’d learned where and how he could be hurt, so that it wouldn’t barely count.

This felt like his ligaments were pulling unmoored, tearing him apart.

He let go of the rope of webbing. They fell. The rest of the scuffle disappeared in a haze of pain and shock and staccato bursts of gunfire like flares in the night, dumped out of his short term memory by the time he was dragging himself up the wall counting windows to find his dorm room, a deep bass throbbing in his head and in his arm. Miles was alive, and hadn’t been shot, but he felt like roadkill, like he’d been smeared raw and open across an unpaved street.

“Dude,” Ganke said, tipping his headphones down to collar around his neck and filling the dusky monitor-lit room with the tinny ghost of music. “You look like _shit_.”

Miles pulled his mask off and apparently the impression got worse, because Ganke’s face twitched like he was politely trying not to grimace. “I feel like shit,” he said. “Excuse me, I’m gonna sleep for the next three years.” When he rolled out of bed too late in the morning, having missed first and most of second period and feeling like his whole body was one big ache, the fact that his online news app was singing the praises of an illegal arms bust at the Brooklyn Navy Yard courtesy of Spider-Man was a cold consolation.

He spent most of a semester waiting to heal. One of the very best things about his powers, aside from the swaggering strength and the thrill of doing swan dives off tall buildings, was the fact that fights didn’t usually take much of a lingering physical toll. Every stiff twinge and twanging muscle spasm when he swung right arm dominant now was an unwelcome reminder of mortality, and a liability in future scuffles if it restricted his range of motion or slowed him down, gave him an obvious tell. Miles ached when he woke up. He ached when it rained. Ibuprofen, naproxen, Tylenol, NSAIDs both prescription and over the counter; braces, slings, ace bandages cinched tight enough to warp bone and sinew, lidocaine patches paper mache’d over back and neck and elbow, massage chairs, stretching before exercise, stretching _after_ exercise-- nothing helped for long.

Before class he would splash water on his face in the floor’s communal restroom and uncap a tiny brass pot of Tiger Balm, nearly dislocating his other shoulder to twist around behind himself and rub the ointment in through skin and muscle where he felt the floating edge of the scapula, the cloying menthol fumes making his eyes water, and hope that today the itching icy-hot burn of it would ameliorate anything. It never did.

Eventually you just learned how to live with it.

\---

Miles had learned to live with a lot of things.

It wasn’t the pain that woke him in the darkness of Peter’s new apartment. The pain was always there now, tuning itself in and out like an old radio, a blunt pressure like someone knuckling down hard beneath his shoulder that sometimes spiked worse, and its presence wasn’t unusual enough to rouse him. It wasn’t the fact of finding himself alone in bed, either, no warm body filling the soft shallow hollow beside him that Peter’s weight had worn in the mattress; after years of gracelessly playing politeness chicken with who got custody of the overworn bed and who had to pretend to sleep on the floor Peter had finally done as he’d promised and rescued a pull out couch from someone’s curb during the move. The couch smelled of stale smoke and the upholstery was scratchy but Miles at least felt better about him making up a camp bed there of ragged sheets and extra pillows than he had when Peter was resigning himself to a night of backaches and thin rest, and tonight Peter wasn’t sleeping there, either.

The new apartment wasn’t that different from the old apartment, and it wasn’t really that new anymore. After the lease on his matchbox tenement had finally expired he’d relocated to a slightly more upscale section of the neighborhood with a view that managed to look out over a street dotted with stunted trees instead of an empty wall, and all the boxes had been fully unpacked, and there were two and a half rooms instead of just one and a half bath, a real bedroom with a door that always seemed to want to be ajar and a kitchen sort of halfheartedly partitioned off from the living area with a faux-marble counter. The particulars changed, but there was a certain sense of the man that suffused it, a set to the air that Miles could recognize by feel alone-- Peter’s universe. Peter’s apartment. Peter’s home.

Miles rolled over onto his good side and tried to blink himself back into sleep but the fog of it was already lifting from him, consciousness stirring and stretching. Soft noises were spilling into the bedroom from the living room; stocking feet shuffling across stiff floorboards, something wet sizzling as it was introduced to hot metal. The clock radio announced 2:46 in a pattern of red diamonds, an unreal hour.

He was thinking in fits and starts, still wanting to stay in that molasses-thick sleep space for awhile, just drifting. Back home they’d invested in a white board. Ganke had hung it on the back of their door with single-use adhesive tape and divided the field of it into fifths by bright pink dry-erase marker, a section for every spider, the thick-edged slash of a tally mark for every jump; he’d been making a point. A forest of lines filled Peter’s column, many more than for anyone else, Ganke had circled his name in red suggesting significance in data collection. Sometimes Miles wondered if it was worth it, whatever strange thing it was they had, and then he remembered that every one of those marks meant something, that the memories didn’t blend together but stayed distinct, every jump bringing him something else to hold onto.

Whatever Peter was cooking was starting to smell hearty and good. Miles struggled out of bed slowly and went to meet him, easing the door the rest of the way open with just enough force that the hinge didn’t squeak and pausing at the threshold.

Peter was standing at the sleek electric stove with his back to him, dressed sloppily in mismatched sweat socks and a red and black Spider-Man t-shirt half tucked into the loose elastic waist of his faded pinstriped boxers. His naked forearms were thatched with bristly hair in thickets that almost hid the raised calcified ridges of old scars, shiny pink lines and pockmarks that pinched the skin around them, memorializing hardscrabble battles, two decades of mistakes. All up he made the kind of picture that Miles might have expected to come accessorized with a cigarette dripping ash into the pan or an open half-full bottle of dark beer, but Peter, apparently resolutely, did not drink. The most that Miles had ever seen him do was lift a sticky bottle of Manischewitz with an ancient peeling label from the top shelf of the lone cabinet above the sink on Hanukkah and slurp a few carelessly measured fifths of it from a chipped Brooklyn Dodgers coffee mug-- and while it was possible that there were things that Peter did that he would not let Miles see him do, Miles considered that prospect unlikely. Having seen the worst zenith of the wreckage that Peter’s life had descended into, what more could really be embarrassing, could really be all that much worse?

He was up frying bologna after midnight, which Miles considered to be in of itself a kind of cry for help. “Pretty sure that’s not kosher, dude,” Miles said.

Peter grunted. He didn’t seem surprised that Miles was awake, or that he’d been watching. “Nitrates are good for you,” he said, sliding the edge of a spatula under a circle of pinkish-speckled meat product that had gone a caramelized golden around its rim and using it to transfer the bologna onto a moist piece of rye bread at rest atop a plastic IKEA plate. The plate was waved in Miles’ general direction expectantly until he padded over and took it. “Eat your sandwich.”

Cooked bologna didn’t taste much different from the same served up as a cold cut in the cafeteria, except that it was now disconcertingly warm. Miles leaned against an empty stretch of counter and chewed slowly, watching as Peter peeled back the yellow plastic backing of the Oscar Meyer package again to separate two more slices from their dwindling stack and slap them onto the preheated skillet. The line of his mouth was a thin slash that pulled downward and a shock of his hair fell across his face. There were more touches of grey frosting it now.

“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” Miles asked, and Peter grunted again, rolling out his hunched right shoulder in a way that made a muscle at the back of his jaw tighten grimly. Miles flexed his wrist in response, pressing through the way the joint wanted to seize and lock up, feeling it. “Me neither.”

Still bent over his work as though it really required watching, Peter glanced across at Miles from the corner of his eye and reached down to palm a drawer open, finding by feel alone a fist-sized bottle of Motrin that rattled sparsely when he shook it. “I’ve got muscle relaxers in the bathroom cabinet,” he said, thumping the bottle down on the counter for Miles to snap up. Miles took it, tipped three oblong pressed-white pills into the cup of his hand, and swallowed them down ignoring the chalky taste against his tongue. “Nothing heavy duty, but if it gets too bad that’s an option.”

“Do they work?” Miles asked.

“Between you and me, they don’t do shit. But sometimes it’s fun to pretend.”

Miles felt the pills as a lump in his throat, and he set the rest of his slowly cooling sandwich aside uneaten. He leaned back, clenched his fist against the rounded-off edge of the counter until he thought his knuckles might spilt the skin. That arm had scaled skyscrapers, that hand had punched a rock in half without so much as a surface-level skinning; Peter had once held back ten tons of reckless metal and potential energy in the form of a runaway train with his body and web fluid alone. How could it hurt this badly, even so?

“Doesn’t it ever get better?” he asked, frustration wheedling in his voice.

Peter took the pan from the burner, set it aside to focus on his face. “I wish I could tell you it did, kid,” he sighed. “You just have to--”

Suddenly, Miles was uninterested in learning what Peter thought he should do. The tidal surge of his blood was crashing in his ears, swelling in his chest, something roaring up and cresting and threatening to swallow him, the last straining straw finally snapped. Three years, he’d known him. Three years they’d been friends, working together, eating together. Miles had helped him move, done the hard dirty work of paring down the things he wouldn’t need to take with him into his new life and disposing of them, pouring over Craigslist ads, encouraging him to find a place he really liked. They’d spent countless hours on stake-out, waiting in the night without expectation, enjoying the comfort of each other’s quiet company. He’d seen Peter hurt, streaming bright blood from a twice-broken nose and coming back up swinging. Something and everything and nothing had passed between them, and still this. Still Peter only saw him as a child. He was reminded of it every trip at least once but this time-- this time, already fragile, it sundered his heart right apart and dissolved the pieces to acid in his stomach.

“Peter,” he barked, the words ripping from him. “You’ve got to stop calling me a kid. I’m almost eighteen. I’m a man.”

As though the blow had been physical, Peter recoiled. He staggered a step backwards, each pace he took making Miles want to get closer in his space; he advanced doggedly, determined not to allow Peter’s retreat and matching every unconscious movement. “You’re not, though,” Peter said quietly, plaintively.

“I am!”

Peter’s eyes had softened, expression open and wounded, hurt for him. “Miles, you don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?” Miles demanded. “I’ve punched Goblin in the face-- I’ve punched Doc Ock in the face, for _you_ , and oh by the way I’ve saved your sorry ass at least twice --what else do I have to do?”

“You don’t know how young you are,” Peter said. His arm had come up, hand out, hovering just to the left of Miles’ shoulder as if he wanted very badly to reach the rest of the way and take it but couldn’t bring himself to. “Trust me, I know. I was there, Miles, I remember-- you think you’re on top of the world, even when it hurts, even when it’s bad it’s still so good, you feel like God.” His voice cracked down the middle, old and worn hard and broken. “But you don’t _know_. You’re Spider-Man, and you’re good at it, but you’re not a man.”

Something hot boiled in the pit of his stomach and whip-quick Miles completed the motion, lashed out to grab Peter’s wrist, holding down until he felt bone squeeze together. It had been building for awhile, he realized too late, until there was too much heat in him not to explode-- all those years of thinking Peter saw right through him, wondering if he saw his true face or only the mask of Miles Morales, a thin plastic effigy of the real thing. “When am I gonna be? Why am I old enough to decide I’m ready to risk my life every night but I’m not old enough to be an adult? That’s bullshit! You respect me in the suit because that’s not me, just another Spider-Man, but it comes off and suddenly I’m some dumb kid?”

“You’re not--”

“Peter, _I am not your son!_ ”

Silence filled the kitchen, the kind of quiet that followed a gunshot, that felt its echoes in the air and would soon be filled with weeping. Miles could see Peter’s broad chest going up and down, up and down, fast and rabbity through his thin cotton t-shirt; saw too now that the man that had always seemed so big to him, tall and strong and towering, larger than life, wasn’t so very big at all. Maybe it was Miles who had filled out, shot up taller and grown into himself, and with the creeping gradual way it had happened had never had cause to notice it before now, but either way he seemed very human, very close.

In Peter’s dark eyes there was a sickened shock, and when it receded it left a familiar, well-worn grief in its wake, an obscene stripped-open emotion dredged up out of the sludge he’d tried to smother it in, and Miles knew that what Peter had buried there had not been for him. His hand came up to settle slackly on top of Miles’ where it was holding his other wrist, the weight of his palm a mottled warm velvet and fingers almost easing between his to loosen their grip, and Miles wanted to kiss him, wanted to kiss him, wanted to make it real. “No,” Peter said slowly, and swallowed so deep that the thick knot of his adam’s apple dipped all the way low in his throat. “You’re not.”

Abrupt and rapid, the hot edge of the feeling cooled and settled. Peter’s rough callused fingertips stroked lightly down the fine bones of the back of Miles’ hand as he dragged his own hand away, and Miles’ fingers came open to let him take his bloodless wrist back. Three years, and he was still making this decision, over and over, to let Peter go. Despite his protests Miles knew that he was young, and that he’d been too young to be mentally sorted as anything but mentee and protege and student when they’d first met, but with time and the camaraderie of fellow fighters, respect had flowered into more than that. They were equal. They were partners.

_Danger_ , the spider sense crooned to him as Peter reached out again, sudden and impulsive, scooping him up in scarred arms still corded strong as the cables that held up the bellies of bridges and crushing him to his soft, firm chest, and Miles saw it coming, and let it happen without feeling the briefest urge to flinch away. Those arms had cradled crying children and pulled bodies from the fire and caught civilians tumbled from tall buildings; they were meant to keep people safe. Peter’s hands still felt large balling in the back of the shirt Miles slept in and his breath was a warm summer breeze snuffling through the short hair at the nape of Miles’ neck as he nosed down into the meat of his shoulder; and Miles knew, now, that there was only a few inches, maybe a half a foot of difference left between them, but he still felt small in Peter’s arms, acquiescing for once into the urge to be protected. He hugged back around Peter’s wide waist and braced them together, swaying against the grip of gravity, huddled close in his tiny kitchen while the Earth moved at a thousand miles per hour beneath their feet.

“I really am so proud of you, you know,” Peter said, as if it pained him, his breath against the cloth making a circle of Miles’ shirt humid wet. “So, so proud.”

“I know,” Miles said, and squeezed him tighter, until his shoulder began to ache again in earnest and beyond it, ignoring the hurt. This time, he wanted to be selfish; wanted to hold on until he forgot he would have to let go. “I’m proud of you, too.”

Peter gave a shallow, deathless laugh. “For what?” he asked.

And because it was obvious, Miles said, “For everything.”

\---

Gwen Stacy beat the drums like they owed her money. The crash bang boom of sticks coming down on synthetic skin and cymbal was the toneless angry nightmare of a chest of dishware going down a metal staircase. It was music without melody, all chaotic joyful violence; the kind of music a berserker would make, high on bath salts and thinking himself a warrior of the damned. Miles sat on the cloth-covered hood of a mothballed red sports car in her dad’s garage and tapped his foot along on the oil-spattered concrete to what he sort of thought the beat was, or was supposed to be, and waited for it to stop happening.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t good; she was plenty good at whatever it was she was doing, and with the addition of other instruments and voices it might have made for a pretty decent drumline. It was just that, alone, Gwen’s drumming felt frantic and furious and personal, and it wasn’t really for him.

“ _Don’t give a_ damn _‘bout my bad reputation--_ ”

And neither was her singing.

“Hey Gwen,” Miles said when she was finished, the final smash of the cymbals still ringing with lingering tinnitus in his ears. “If you don’t do friends anymore, how come you’re in a band?”

“You don’t have to have friends to be a drummer,” she said coolly, flipping her hair at him. “You just have to show up.”

They went outside and up the crooked white-painted drain spout to lay on the sun warmed roof of the carport, finding shapes in wisps of clouds like pulled cotton. The air smelled like lilac and camellia. It was a perfect day.

“Actually,” she said after some time, “I’d known them for a while. Me and Mary Jane were friends before Peter.”

Miles sort of wished he could just be a normal kid for once, ask her about ballet practice or which of the triumphantly fat college acceptance letters she was going to select for the fall, but instead he fixated on the band t-shirt she was wearing under an open black sweater. It was obviously hand-dyed, screenprinted with a home kit they’d gotten from Hobby Lobby and a hot steam iron, jagged blocky lettering announcing THE MARY-JANES! It was lopsidedly painted across the round belly of her drum kit, too. “That where the name came from?”

Gwen glanced askance at herself. “It’s the name of a ladies’ shoe,” she said. “But yeah, it’s also kind of about Mary Jane Watson.”

“That must be kinda awkward.”

“What, band practice with my dead best friend’s ex-girlfriend? Nah. Not a chance.”

Her smile, sardonic and deadly sweet, was still shining. Gwen had collected piercings like Peter collected battle scars, and she glittered in the sun, glinting off a fringe of earrings, the zirconium stud through the cartilage of her nose. _I like to let my dad think this is my only form of teenage rebellion_ , she’d told him once about her father, Captain Stacy, who was also a cop, on a night when they’d been squatting between a dumpster and a vending machine behind a 7-11 in Alphabet City following a rough punch-up with a purse thief who’d turned out to have a Glock, a hand-rolled clove cigarette between her plump cherry gloss-shiny lips. _Throw him off the scent._

“Your MJ sounds pretty different from Peter’s,” Miles said.

“She’s not _my_ MJ--”

“I mean, starting a band and all. Getting wild. The one in my universe is a lawyer.”

“And Peter’s is a former model who also used to work for Tony Stark,” Gwen said. “So? We know a version of Peter that’s an actual cartoon pig. People change.”

They looked into the endless sky. Miles imagined himself falling up, into the thin cold atmosphere, tumbling free beyond the stars to the place where infinity was, all those red threads of spider’s silk unfurling like heartstrings. “Do you think that’s why it didn’t work with them?” Miles asked. He rolled over onto his side, ignoring that it was his bad side, and propped himself up on his elbow. “They were too different?”

Gwen was still on her back, hands clasped and folded just beneath her stomach, so stiff and still and serious in black that she might have been practicing for her own funeral. “I think Peter B. Parker makes a lot of problems for himself,” she said. “And also for everybody else.”

“No, like, for serious,” Miles said. “Do you ever feel like with all this secret identity stuff there’s like… this part of you that you wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone who didn’t do the vigilante thing too, that even if you explained it to them they just wouldn’t get? You’re in this whole other world, and you’d never be able to be with them, and it wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

Now Gwen did sit up, a frisson of unease moving clouds across her face. “Miles,” she started, frowning, and took a breath and set her jaw like she was preparing to launch into a speech she’d spent a long time practicing, fearing this. She was giving him the _oh god, not this again_ look.

He shook his head, shook a hand at her too for good measure. “Not-- oh, shit, no, not like that. We’re cool. We’ve been cool.”

“Okay,” she said, half-doubtfully, but her hackles lowered.

“Promise,” Miles said, holding out his fist for a bump, and when she knocked their knuckles together, relaxed. “I’ve just been thinking, you know, we’re getting to an age where you want to start gettin’ into stuff like that.”

“You’re a _man_ ,” Gwen said. She was too dignified to snicker, but it still came out in her voice.

Miles rolled his eyes. “I just want to make it work,” he said. “When it happens.”

She eyed him for a moment with that sharp-eyed gaze like the blade of a paring knife, carefully flaying him to examine the raw everything underneath. Gwen had his number from the first time she saw him, and then the first time she’d seen him for real; it was why he needed to be here. “I’ve kind of loosened up on it,” she said, settling back again. “The not having friends thing. It makes a lot of stuff easier, though, not having that weak spot. Less things that can go wrong.” She closed her eyes. “When you date civilians, things can go really wrong. That was Peter’s problem. It wasn’t MJ, it was him.”

“He told you?” Miles asked, surprised.

“He didn’t need to. I just knew.”

A beetle black Chevy SUV rolled sluggishly down the alley below them. Miles watched it go until it had turned the corner and gone out of sight. “Was it a… spider sense thing?”

“It was a real life thing,” she said. “I don’t know. If you’re roundabout asking what I’d do, I don’t think I’d date someone regular. And I wouldn’t trust a Peter Parker again.” Her frown deepened. “Any of them.”

“Even the pig?”

“ _Especially_ not the pig. Who knows where he’s been?”

\---

Six weeks after that in B-Side New York, while Peter was in the bathroom, Miles remembered something that had been bothering him, and feeling guilty without understanding why he stole a few seconds to google Gwen Stacy on his phone. He stared at the screen for a very long time.

That was like any other pain, probably. It either outlasted you or, eventually, you learned how to live with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to everybody who's been leaving comments so far, y'all are so nice I can't believe it.


	5. Spooky Action at a Distance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some mildly risque content in this part, so if you're not here for that, skip the third section.

The box showed up on the morning of Halloween via RedEx overnight express with a postmark from Massachusetts and warning red stickers exclaiming FRAGILE! all over it. Miles woke up blearily to the notification on his phone and tripped down three flights of stairs in Founders Hall with his shoes half on to get to the mail desk. He signed for the package with a sleepy RA who sipped caramel macchiato from a styrofoam Starbucks cup unimpressed while he fumbled his student ID from his wallet, and then took the stairs, again, two and then three at a time.

There was another box inside the box, swaddled in dark, smooth, nonconductive electrical tape, and also a folded over copy of the Enquirer with a big blurry picture of someone in a classic Spider-Man suit with a pot-boiled belly swinging through traffic on the front page under the headline “PETER PARKER ALIVE AND LIVING WITH ELVIS!” It promised further details on a page Ganke hadn’t seen fit to send along, though he had stuck a post-it note beneath the glamor shot with “lol smooth” scrawled across it. Miles sliced through the tape around the seam of the lid of the smaller box with the keen edge of a steel penknife usually used for hacking raw canvas down to size and thumbed it open.

Packed tight amid a drift of squishy polyurethane peanuts sat two circlets of flexible plastic about the size and general shape of the kind of blocky ankle bracelet clapped on prisoners out for house arrest. A note written on loose graphing paper was folded between them, and Miles eased that out first and uncreased it, squinting at the slanted letters written in Ganke’s too-quick hand. Scientist handwriting was even worse for legibility than artist handwriting, given a certain type of scientist.

_Yo, Spider-Man._

_First off, these are prototypes, and they’re built on a best guess. I’m not a wishes and fairy dust kind of guy, but without access to better equipment the physics of this is all just theory so let’s hope I got it right. The cuffs emit a pulse that should disrupt electromagnetic frequencies, reversing a tripolar charge on the subatomic level. Basically, it should make certain properties of matter inert. Which SHOULD be benign in other respects. I hope. Again, no electron microscope-- but matter in other universes really doesn’t seem to be made much different from matter here, it’s just there are particular force markers on our atoms unique to each that have made other dimensions reject you like a bad organ transplant. Try ‘em out._

_I made one for you, and one for Peter. There’s no difference between them, you can resize them easy, I just assume you’ll give him the other one because obviously. If they work let me know and I’ll get some more going for Gwen and everybody. Actually let me know either way. Collect that data, lab rat, this is_ so _going to be my Master’s thesis project._

_Miles, you’re my best bro, so I’m gonna be real with you. There’s a pretty good chance, theoretically, that this won’t just stop the glitching, it’ll stop you getting pulled over altogether. I did this for you as a favor, because you’re my bro and it’s fascinating as hell and working on it might, I don’t know, help me change the nature of science and what we know about reality forever, which would be neat. But mostly I’m doing it because I don’t want you to get hurt._

_So whatever you decide to do with them, I hope it’ll be the thing that hurts the least._

_\--Agent Q_

Miles folded the note up very small and tucked it back in the box. Sometimes Ganke was too smart for his own good, or anyone else’s.

The cuffs were dense and surprisingly heavy, with a thick chunky control box featuring a tiny light that glowed a malignant red. When he switched it on it constantly emitted a low-grade hum, the sort of deep edge-of-consciousness electrical thrumming of a refrigerator or fluorescent light bulb singing to itself, alive with conductive current and never really at rest. It hummed at the frequency of the universe, Miles felt, strumming along with each infinitesimal string that made up each impossibly tiny atom that combined to make absolutely everything. It pulsed at the same speed as his thoughts. When he touched it, laying his fingers uncertainly atop the plastic casing, he expected to find it vibrating, as though it were alive.

He rolled up his jeans and pushed down his sweat sock and strapped it around his left ankle, letting it get warm from his skin. The slight new weight made him feel a little lopsided at first but then he barely noticed it, and only when he was making a purposeful effort to. It was easy to forget about, though maybe Miles had just become adept at compartmentalization; there were so many separate facets of his life that couldn’t be allowed to overlap or mix, and he tuned out whatever wasn’t relevant as Miles Morales when he was being Spider-Man, and whatever wasn’t relevant as Spider-Man when he was out of the suit. He sat down at his desk and wrote half of an essay on Foucalt and Post-Modernist philosophy, and then he took the cuff back off again, and wondered if he felt any different. Maybe those chemical changes, like the percolating synaptic reactions that formed joy and love and other behaviors in the brain, were too small to be felt on the level of an entire organism while they were happening. Maybe you just had to wait and see, and take it on faith that someday you would shift into another state.

That wasn’t taking any of the magic out of it. As the saying went, sufficiently advanced science _was_ magic, by another name.

\---

Miles didn’t remember when he’d gone back to lying to himself about what he wanted from Peter, but he remembered the day he’d realized it wasn’t going to work.

He’d been telling lies for a long time. Little ones, things people would never think twice about-- that a friend’s new haircut looked good, say --and bigger things, the whole half of his life that he could tell almost no one about. Ganke had become his best friend both because he liked him and by necessity, but even knowing the secret wasn’t the same as feeling it, and so the sharing there was somewhat thin. Miles lied to his parents, to his friends, to his teachers, always reaching for bumbling excuses as to why he was late, where the black eye and fat lip had come from, why he seemed so tired, but he never felt like he had lied to Peter, even by omission, because his attraction was obvious, and it was always there.

For himself, though, he’d become adept at ignoring it, letting love fade like the flesh and ink of an old tattoo-- part of him, marking him, there so long and so worn in that it became part of an identity and he forgot to remember it, easy to look over but always present, impossible to bleed away. That love was comfortable and deep and he didn’t need to feed it, he told himself, didn’t need that fire to spark tinder in Peter’s heart to be warmed by it.

Then the summer after junior year of high school, Peter had shown up at his house and ruined the carefully constructed illusion.

It was a warm day in August, just warm enough, and Miles and Ganke had been wasting time in his room at his parents’ house, sitting around with the lights off and trying not to melt, Ganke sprawled half across his unmade bed flipping through a pile of sketchbooks making comments on ideas for new suit designs while Miles fiddled half heartedly with his turntable, playing the same scratchy sample of a classic Bee Gees tune until it wore a groove in his mind as well as the vinyl.

“Hey, what about Barbara?” Ganke asked, still addressing the sketchbook.

“From AP Bio? She’s cool, I guess. Nice hair.”

“Or Katie Bishop, she’s totally got a thing for you.”

“She’s moving to Los Angeles, though.”

Ganke pretended to check his watch. “Oh, hey, looks like it’s the twenty-first century and the internet exists. Not to mention cell phones.”

Miles tossed an empty Koke can at him; lacking the reflexes of a spider, Ganke let it hit him in the hat and bounce harmlessly off the bedspread. “Why do I gotta prove to you I’ve got game, man?” he asked. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been kind of busy saving the city lately. Got a lot goin’ on.”

“Mm-hmm.” Ganke, and also LeBron James from a poster Miles had had on his wall since he was twelve, stared at him judgmentally. “You ever even been on a date?”

“Have _you?”_

“Yes? I do actually have a life outside of running interference for Spider-Man, y’know.”

Miles thought about the number of Friday nights he’d seen his friend do anything other than read comics and pound a medically unsafe volume of energy drink and work on his thesis, and tried to keep his incredulity muted. “Skyping girls you meet on internet forums doesn’t count,” he said.

“Says who? Anyway, I found her on YouTube.”

“Finally, something positive comes out of the YouTube comments section.”

Certain kinds of instinct were more like a muscle, stronger and more refined the longer you used them, more active tool than impartial reaction, and as Miles had learned to lean into his inexplicable gut feelings of unease or excitement the nuance he could wring from his spider sense sharpened by degrees of precision. The shivering shock of another presence in his space, the pleasant electric current of it that prickled gooseflesh across his skin no longer opened up that place of awe inside him; the recognition had become regular. But still welcome, and intimately so. Miles felt the warm spectral pressure of fingers walking up his spine from base to neck and leaned back in his chair to peer out the window, to see if he could spot Peter coming up the sun-dimmed street. He cracked the window open a few inches, letting the heat leak in and giving Peter a foothold. All of it was familiar, routinely, disturbingly so.

“Can’t you guys ever just use the front door like normal people?” Ganke asked when, inevitably, Peter shoved the window the rest of the way up and clambered through it, an inelegant tangle of legs and limbs. At first Miles would have expected him to be star struck by the appearance of a version of one of his heroes, but Ganke had become used to it too and rapidly adopted a _seen one, seen ‘em all_ sort of attitude.

“Force of habit,” Peter said, righting himself, and he swept a hand through his ruffled hair, and he actually smiled. “Anyway I’m completely aware that I’m not normal, thank you.”

Peter didn’t have a travel bag of his own, but he did have a cache of essential items for an overnight stay stowed in the spare room at Aunt May’s where the bereaved family had shoved most of the overflow items from Mr. Parker’s secret shed, the things that weren’t practical or important or beloved enough for MJ to want to hang onto. So Peter travelled light, secure with his safety deposit stash of toiletries like the proverbial sack of cash under the floorboards waiting at his not-Aunt’s place, and he’d dressed casual for the occasion. He’d shaved recently enough that the film of stubble across his jaw was more promise than indictment, and he smelled of laundry detergent on top of old sweat-- these were the parameters Miles usually used as a yardstick for where Peter was at on a relative scale of functional competence, and he could tell that today had all the elements of a good day. That was something else experience, not instinct, had taught him how to recognize.

“You good, Peter?” Miles asked, because he had to-- it was also part of their routine, though it often felt unnecessary now. Check for hurt, for trouble, try to divine or deduce the machination that caused the jump, the shift in states that had made separation intolerable. The answer was, almost always, less physical than that, and so if it was recognized it went unacknowledged.

As usual, Peter shrugged. “Yeah, I’m good.” The way the smile pulled soft and secretive at the corners of his mouth made Miles’ heart skip, and then his fingers made the record he’d been fiddling with skip too. “Hey, what are you up to right now?”

With nothing else to do on a lazy Sunday they wound up on the train to Coney Island, and at no point on the trip would Miles have been able to explain why. Even after all the renovations and revitalization projects it was still a kind of corny place to bring two older teenagers, and worse, a tourist trap, a landmark familiar by name from movies and therefore a stop on every tour and anathema to a lot of locals. On a weekend in the height of summer it was crowded and beyond crowded, portly midwestern fathers in mustard-stained t-shirts herding children of all ages from stop to stop along the boardwalk, families queuing up gamely for the ferris wheel or a hand of cotton candy. The sun was sharp and clear and the crowd noise burbled like slipstream around them and in this knot of sensory overload, awareness of every human around him crashing against his perception, Miles oriented himself around Peter and found his calm.

It had been hard, for a while, living in one of the world’s largest and busiest and noisiest cities, awash with new senses and constantly hyperaware of absolutely everything. Miles had learned to flex the muscle in that way, too, tune out what wasn’t necessary or dangerous, relearned how to let everyday things vanish fuzzy into the background of life. Real spiders didn’t have this problem. But then again, real spiders couldn’t make themselves invisible or turn their eight sticky hands into tasers.

Miles stood on the boardwalk, his arm hanging companionably, dangerously close to Peter’s arm, and watched a seagull tear at the open belly of a dropped bag of marshmallow circus peanuts. Ganke had come with them but kept fading in and out, all his focus glued to his phone, so Miles just walked with Peter and occasionally pointed out an interesting tourist and tried to figure out why they were there. Maybe it was just a place to be, and to enjoy not having anywhere else you needed to go.

While Peter was in line for pizza, Miles found a circular plastic table under the shade of a red and yellow segmented parasol and took out his sketchbook, which was what he usually did to fill up any idle moments. He had twitchy hands, always wanting to be in motion, and it was a good way to smooth through twitchy thoughts, no room when his pen was moving for anxiety or overthinking or even conscious composition, just line and shape and color, the sight and the feel of it.

“Check it,” he said as Peter pulled out a lightweight plastic chair around the circumference of the table beside him, and gestured with the capped end of the pen towards a man in cut-off shorts and a backwards ballcap who was eating a mint chocolate chip ice cream and dripping most of it down his hands, and then towards the sketchbook. The man had an odd, angular face and Miles had made it even more exaggerated in his style, transforming him not quite into a cartoon character but something just a step removed from lifelike.

Chewing through a bite of sloppy cheese still so hot it dripped, Peter let out a low impressed wolf whistle. “That’s pretty good,” he said, and Miles should have found it disgusting instead of endearing, but part of maturity was in accepting your own faults, and he’d come to terms with it. “What else have you got?”

An artist’s sketchbook was a very personal thing, a piece of the soul, a window into the mind, and for Miles it was very much a visual diary. He’d added to it little by little, doodling and drafting every day, idle on the train and in class, anytime he needed something to do with himself, and it was all just loose nonsense, stretching his muscles for more important pieces; just a lot of aimless messing around. Its unlined pages were filled up with his own name, with drafts of back alley murals he’d never be able to complete and quick caricature portraits of faces that stuck out to him on the street, raw and honest and unpolished, an intimate thing. Miles cracked it open to the first page and handed Peter his heart.

“Just stuff,” he said, reaching over, and through some delicate sleight of hand swapped the book for Peter’s slice.

Peter wiped the grease off his palms onto his shorts before beginning to thumb through, intent on each page. “ _Good_ stuff,” he assured him, pausing to contemplate a page that was just hands in different positions: fingers splayed, curled, holding each other, hands that were wide-knuckled and gnarled, hands that were small and soft. Miles wondered if he recognized the hands he’d modeled from memory as the hands that were holding the book. He turned the page. “I always thought it would be neat to be able to draw like this,” he said, “but it’s like, you’ve got to have some kind of vision for it. Or something you want to say.”

Remembering the silent clenched-teeth scream behind the mural still hidden amid the warren of damp train tunnels and access corridors beneath Brooklyn, the unspeakable frustration that had dripped from every broad-strokes stripe of aerosol paint, Miles didn’t disagree; but remembering, too, the box of old photographs and a cold December day, he looked at Peter again. “What about your pictures?” he asked.

“That’s different,” Peter said, flapping the hand that wasn’t palming the spine of the sketchbook dismissively. “Even when you’re good at it, photography’s a different kind of art.”

“But it’s still art.”

“Didn’t say it isn’t, just that it’s… yeah, different. Photography is about capturing something that’s already there, pinning down a powerful moment. You can get some great images, sure, because real life is full of stuff that’s ugly and beautiful and perfect and fucked up. It’s just not yours.” Very carefully he closed the book but continued to hold onto it, observe the blank cover with the neon _property of Miles Morales_ sticker on the front.

Miles let their fingers brush when he took it back from him. “There’s something special in that, anyway,” he said. “Being able to recognize those perfect moments when you see them. Most people don’t do that. Most people don’t look twice at anything.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe when you decide to take that picture, you kind of make it yours.”

They fed the rest of Peter’s pizza to the birds, and kept walking. The pier was all boards washed grey by salt and winter wind, bleached the same bony color and texture as driftwood. White dots of sea birds wheeled and screamed in the sky, sometimes lighting down to touch the top of the water where it was shining, sometimes climbing higher towards the distant clouds. The sea and the sky and the horizon were an open canvas, all clear open blue. Somewhere near, but not too near, calliope music piped an excitable carnival mood from the amusement park; if Miles had been a little younger, or maybe a little older, they probably would have gone down that way, ridden the ferris wheel and the gentle roller coaster and the garish merry go round with its menagerie of fantasy animals. Instead Miles watched the water, and became slowly aware that Peter was watching him, the weight of his stare a warmth that lay on his skin like the sunlight.

“Hold still,” Peter said, his phone in his hands as he shuffled around, and Miles focused on not moving until he heard the stock sound click of a camera shutter fluttering. “Okay.”

Miles turned to him, put his back to the water. “You took a picture of me?”

“Sorry,” Peter said. “Shoulda asked first.”

“No, it’s…” Miles’ mouth felt dry, enough that his tongue stuck to his teeth when he swallowed. “It’s cool. Can I see?”

He passed the phone over and Miles stared through the window of it, looking to see what Peter had seen there, what it was he’d wanted to take and remember. It was only a cell phone camera, but with only a cell phone camera now anyone could be an artist, and Peter had been practicing for a very long time. Unfiltered the sun caught the lens harshly, but it lit Miles up glowing, warming his skin smooth like rich oiled wood. He looked older, Miles thought, and unrecognizable even to himself, smiling wan and relaxed and unhurried into the light, older and taller and no longer gangly. It wasn’t a special moment, just something quiet and ordinary, but then again, neither had any of the pictures of MJ commemorated anything out of the ordinary either-- just a split second of life, irreplaceable and at peace, caught before it slipped away.

Peter was still looking at him, and Miles cleared his throat. “See, I told you,” he said. “Art.”

“Nah, Miles. That’s all you.”

Eventually Ganke came back, a half life size stuffed Spider-Man he’d won from an airsoft carnival booth tucked under his arm, and the day was done. They took the ferry coming back from the peninsula because Miles had never been on it yet and wanted to see, and Peter wanted to go inside the cabin and stretch himself out across plush seats and sleep. The boat was shiny and white and new, with free wi-fi and chilly air conditioning inside, but the wind coming off the bay smelled unavoidably of brackish water, like saline and decay. Ignoring this Miles and Ganke went up to the wide open prow and stood against the railing, drinking in what was left of the late afternoon; evenings on the East Coast weren’t as breathtaking a spectacle as out on the Pacific but somewhere the sun was going down along the city skyline, bleeding vital reds and pinks across the horizon.

“So, have you been thinking about what I said?” Ganke asked.

“About what?”

“About cause and effect.” Giving up on the promise of wi-fi after much frustrated fiddling, Ganke pocketed his phone and crossed his arms over the railing. “I get it, by the way,” he added.

“Get _what?”_

Ganke glanced over his shoulder to observe the deck behind them, and finding it full of sticky-fingered children not too tired from their day to harrie their exhausted middle-aged guardians from stern to starboard but no scruffy hobos, answered, “Peter. Wouldn’t’ve been my first choice, but you know. He’s a good guy.”

Miles didn’t disagree, but the tone Ganke said it in sort of made him want to drop his friend in the river and swing off to emotional safety. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

“I was just wondering if you’d noticed the pattern yet,” Ganke said. “Remember the thing about quantum entanglement, how a change in one system affects the other instantaneously?”

At the beginning, when it was all still new and slightly scary and Miles had been making a better effort to be scientific about things, he’d kept a pocket spiral notebook full of potential cause and effect in an attempt to triangulate the inflection point of each jump-- what he thought had been going on with Peter, what he knew had been going on with him. The columns had been damning, and eventually he’d stopped. _Peter was having a hard time after MJ turned him down. Peter was upset about Aunt May. I’d lost a fight real bad. Peter and Gwen upset each other._ On and on, a litany of everyday wounds they’d been unable to bandage except together, small and ordinary needs that had nevertheless been enough.

_I want to go on a date, like a normal kid, just once in my life._

Miles knew. He’d always known. It wasn’t fate that kept drawing them together, just the same conscious decision, the same reaction he’d accepted in himself every time: _I need you right now._ You, _Peter B. Parker, and no one else._

“It’s okay,” Ganke said, when Miles hadn’t said anything in a while. “I’m good at keeping your secrets.”

\---

 _Thanks for the stuff, man,_ Miles texted Ganke after considering his response for several hours. _I’m thinking about it._ Then he shut his phone off and stuck the cuffs in a desk drawer and went to a Halloween party, and in fact stopped thinking about it altogether.

Technically, it wasn’t his first college party. Two years ago near Homecoming he’d crashed a frat house bash in the suit, not in the petty business of busting underage drinking but in pursuit of a thief hoping to blend in with the crowd; he’d collected the would-be criminal and also a dozen high fives and several offers to buy him a drink that he’d politely-panicked turned down.

Ganke’s internet girlfriend (and former real-life girlfriend, before he’d left the state and they’d decided to do the long distance thing) was a year ahead of him at NYU, and two months in she was still the only person Miles really knew on campus, even if he didn’t know her that well. Danika had a streak of hot purple highlight in her hair and a hugely popular blog Miles had never heard of and it was kind of a big deal that she’d taken him under her wing, apparently, but that collegiate cultural cachet was harder to capitalize on than Miles would have hoped, and outside of sharing a table with her in their Visual Thinking elective and sometimes grabbing a coffee after he was still fairly starved for meaningful human interaction. Hobbling himself with the constant reminder of his double life made it harder-- he’d scheduled his course load around the need to sleep at four AM most mornings and doze until at least ten o’clock which made for a lot of evening classes, and even with Danika he was always holding back --so the hunter’s orange leaflet someone shoved at him on his way across Washington Square Park between classes had been exciting. A good, simple college party. Good, simple, uncomplicated fun, in costume with people who expected him to be a person under the costume, where it was expected that no one would know his name.

Halloween was a good time to pretend not to be yourself.

The address on the leaflet was for a Hell’s Kitchen loft apartment in a building that could best be described as gentrified grunge, hollowed out and refurbished and rented for obscene amounts of money to twenty-somethings who wanted to give the appearance of slumming it without actually letting anything rub off on them. Miles found it charmingly abhorrent, but the flyer promised loud music and free drinks and a costume contest, and that was all he really needed just then. He took the train to Manhattan at ten-thirty already suited up and feeling at home inside a crowd that jostled with clowns and werewolves and scandalously sexy versions thereof among the more regular freaks and walked the rest of the way. He took the self-service elevator up to the tenth floor and went in the front door, like a normal person.

He walked face-first into a wall of music. The sound was a physical thing, beating in rhythmic waves against him, steadily eroding him like water rolling over a sandy shore. Deep, fast music that set the pace of your heart beat, and low red lighting that masked the few uncovered faces in the crowd in shadow, and enough bodies for a fire code violation moving together and around each other inside. Miles slipped into the crowd, and nobody looked twice at him; between the ghosts and goblins and candy stripers there were at least a dozen different Spider-Men, in both current and classic flavor, executed with varying levels of care and skill. Tall Spider-Men, short Spider-Men, and Miles, who didn’t feel so much as a touch of familiarity from any of them, which was jarring.

The apartment was all stripped-brick walls that bounced the sound from the booming subwoofers all the more harshly, and it looked unlived in, like it existed only to be a venue for semi-illicit revelry. A long table pushed up against the south wall was draped in a crinkly orange and black plastic tarp and spread with pumpkin shaped cookies and a wide-mouthed vat of punch that billowed a thick, boozy miasma. Just standing near it was giving him the dizzy hazy feeling of a contact high (or perhaps a contact drunk), but despite the confined heat of many bodies and the refreshing sweat of condensation rolling appealingly down the glass he hesitated to dip the ladle and portion himself out a drink. _Old enough to fight and die and hurt,_ he reminded himself, but maybe still too young for this, and he’d never been sure how alcohol might react with his powers, didn’t know that he wanted to test it on his own and in public the first time.

The pounding music was starting to make his back teeth hurt. Miles felt the hand approach the back of his shoulder before he felt the tap, and he tried to turn with only a normal amount of speed, not startled. A Spider-Man in Peter’s colors was lurking there, holding a red solo cup and waving at him. His uniform fit him poorly, cheaply made cotton that was loose where it should have been tight and tight where it should have been merely form-fitting, and the holes in the mask showed hazel-silver eyes crinkled up with the lines of a hidden smile. “Nice costume!” he shouted over the music, in a voice too coarse and rumbling and coltish to ever be Peter’s.

Miles looked him up and down again, observed the way the cloth rumpled around shoulders just a little too wide for it, stretched taut across his chest. “You too,” he said.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I made it!”

“Yeah? Right on!” He dipped his head towards the gyrating center of the room, gesturing broadly. “Want to dance?”

Because Miles sort of appreciated his straight-to-the-point initiative, and he’d never wanted to be a wallflower, and he was eighteen and had never even been kissed, he flashed a thumbs-up _yes_.

They moved together, and it was awkward and stiff at first; Miles’ joints were frozen up with the newness and uncertainty of it, and he wished horribly that he’d had a gulp of punch to thaw him, but anything you had to be drunk for to get through probably wasn’t worth doing. It was just for fun, anyway, something free, no strings attached, just hands and hips and less and less space in between them, hungry eyes watching the way Miles’ suit clung to his body. Sweat gathered under the suit and he became aware of the cloth sticking to him, so tight to his skin that it revealed as much as it covered. Miles remembered the slope and shape of Peter’s chest defined through his suit and realized for the first time that the same was true of him, that when this stranger smoothed his palms down Miles’ stomach he could feel the swell and divot of every battle-carved abdominal muscle as his belly sucked in with fluttery breath, as if he were wearing nothing at all. Strong hands brushed the sharp high arch of each hip and held him there, stroked the outsides of his muscular thighs. A broad chest molded against the sine wave of his spine, bearing him up against the wall, no longer dancing or pretending at it, the idea of courting dissolved with the heavy outline of Bargain Bin Spider-Man’s hard-on pressed hot and urgent against his hip.

It could be anyone behind that mask, so Miles pretended it was Peter.

The man was almost as tall as Peter. His chest was shallower and his stomach was slimmer and his sweat smelled like someone else, which was distracting, but Miles focused on the suit and the shivering static electricity that crawled across his skin wherever he was touched and he let himself believe it, as hard as he could. Peter’s crooked nose digging into the nape of his neck, Peter pawing hardscrabble possessive at his ass even as he rolled against him, dragging his hips back fast and rough to encourage Miles to grind and put his weight into it; Peter’s erection prodding at the back of the inside of his thigh, a teasing pressure rubbing through cloth, nothing but the thick swell of it pulsing heat against him and then drawing away. Face to face would be unconscionably intimate even through the masks, but like this it was a selfish motion, the man humping him and giving him no friction, just the thrill of being used.

He wanted to take him in his hands, in his mouth. He wanted to run his tongue over Peter’s velvet-hard skin and fill his throat, Peter’s strong sure fingers curled around the crown of his skull to direct him, first patient then sloppy with surging need; he wanted to hear what Peter’s voice sounded like when he liked it, if he’d make the same obscenely satisfied groan of animal pleasure he let out biting into a burger after a long skirmish or if there would be something new in his voice, something just for Miles. He wanted it to be Peter’s hands fit to leave bruises where they gripped too hard and he wanted the marks of his fangs in his neck and he wanted Peter to make him cum in the suit, cup his big warm hand over the bulge of Miles’ cock straining tight in the spandex and squeeze firm and sure, just hard enough, the pad of his thumb rubbing circles over where the tip was until he leaked so much that the cloth got wet-- and then for Peter to keep going until he was bucking into that touch, his other hand holding Miles’ hips still up against him to control the pace of it. Afterward he’d feel his own jism dripping down the inside of his leg, sticky and filthy, and just want Peter over him all the more.

He wanted to get fucked.

He didn’t want this man to fuck him.

He wanted Peter-- Peter telling him to brace his palms against the headboard of his creaky old bed and hold on, Peter’s rough fingers curling inside him, Peter’s _cock_ inside him, he felt empty and embarrassed of it and he was breathing hard into his mask, gasping, groaning like he’d been wounded and barely hearing himself. He ached, all over and down to the molten core of him, quivering deep in his belly, and this drunk stranger at a party wasn’t Peter, and it wasn’t enough. The wanting was cruel and unfair and it hurt, and at the next push of his hips Miles twisted away.

“Sorry,” he said, over the pulse of the music, and he slipped back into the crowd, the twisting gyre of hands and arms and bodies enmeshed into one big tangle, disappearing among sexy nurses and sexy cats and a half dozen other wanna-be Spider-Men, dizzy in his head, heart lurching. Miles pushed his way past the punch table and the thumping speakers out onto the open balcony and the crisp night air, the voices blending into snatches of meaningless noise. Sweat cooled, left him clammy and uncomfortable and feeling gross, and he headed for the railing. Several people gasped aloud when he hiked himself up onto it, balancing precariously only because he wasn’t trying that hard not to fall; sticky feet and webslinging had long made him cavalier about gravity.

Miles tried not to be overly dramatic, but he felt he was owed one big gesture by the universe, or at least a fast escape out of an awkward situation. Feeling the blood in his ears and and a dozen pairs of eyes on him, he took a swan dive off the edge of the infinity pool and let himself plummet a good four stories before shooting off a line and swinging across the street. It wasn’t that he felt bad, necessarily. It was just time to go.

\---

Miles had had a nice summer at home, packing and repacking all his things again, and then he’d moved himself into one of the twenty-three different dorms at NYU. It seemed like he was always moving between dorms, renegotiating bunk bed contracts, meeting roommates, sleeping in beds that were strange at first and then differently familiar, a succession of too-hard mattresses on flimsy frames; it seemed that his was a transient life, passing between planes, sleeping on floors in apartments that belonged to other versions of himself, never settled. His life was in the things he carried with him, in people and not places, clearing every trace of himself out when his time there had passed.

In Founders Hall he had a roommate who was almost never home, which suited him fine for the purposes of practicality, but left him a little emotionally malnourished. With Ganke there had developed the companionable quiet of laptop keys clacking and headphones bleeding songs Miles knew well enough to hum along to. Now there was just him, and the empty dorm, and his thoughts.

His suit stuck to him when he tried to peel it off, and he felt a little like he was flaying himself stepping out of it. The dusky feeling of arousal had simmered down to a thicker, more condensed kind of wanting that sat heavy inside him, a weight, and he shifted around on its axis trying to find his balance again. Miles pulled himself up onto the top bunk without the aid of the creaky ladder and lay in the not-quite-dark and not-quite-silence of a big city midnight on top of the bedsheets.

“Miles?” someone said into the darkness inside his head, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own thoughts, and then the ceiling opened up and for a second time, a body tumbled out of another dimension and on top of him. A gash tore itself through the fabric of empty air with a swirl of light like the colors that burst behind closed eyes and Peter dropped from the rift like a side of beef, heavy, dead, unresisting weight, winded, as though he’d fallen a long way. He’d caught himself as he landed, leaving Miles not really pinned beneath him, legs a tangle, one elbow and one palm sunken into the mattress and bracketing Miles’ body, their faces very close, and shame crashed over him like a bucket of cold water.

“Hey,” he said, uncertain but not deeply surprised, either-- like Peter had walked in from another room instead of falling from another world --and Peter rolled off. He hung by one hand from the edge of the mattress for a second before dropping down and Miles missed the weight of him instantly, achingly, like evening flowers missed the sun. “Good timing,” he said, even though it wasn’t. Miles swung his legs over the edge of the bed and loomed down at Peter.

Peter seemed to find this doubtful, but he rolled with it. “Is it?”

“Yeah.” Miles sat up slowly to avoid smacking his skull against the low ceiling. “I’ve got something for you.”

Peter didn’t say anything for a moment. He was looking around the room, observing the asymmetrical floor plan not dissimilar but opposite to the layout of the Visions dorms; bed on the left instead of the right, single window, personal miniature refrigerator filled with soda and hard lemonade and soggy Chinese take-out leftovers, bookcase, stereo, desks, overflowing trash bin, fixated on something over Miles’ workspace that he couldn’t see from this perspective. “You kept that, huh?” he asked. He was looking at the framed newspaper article, from so long and longer ago now.

“Of course, man,” Miles said. He eased himself off the bed and felt the shock of the landing all the way up through his ankles and shins, busying himself going through his desk instead of looking at Peter. “It was a gift.” He slipped the dimensional stabilizers into his bag and slung it over his shoulder, keenly aware of the time and the fact that it was, still, a school night. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” Peter said, but he was already moving towards the door. “Lead the way.”

There had been a feeling Miles had sat with for the last few weeks, omnipresent and aware of it off and on, like the swelling of atmospheric pressure before a storm, thick and saturated, ready to break. It was the feeling of something building under the skin, burgeoning, pushing, the indistinct but actionable sense that some danger, the edge of something, was fast approaching; and there was the feeling now that it was finally arrived. It was enough, he thought. One way or another, tonight was going to be enough.

Foam Party had closed down six months after it opened, but trendy upscale coffee shops were still very much in vogue, and Miles knew one close enough to walk to that was open all hours. It had begun to rain, a fine cold autumn mist of a rain, that coated their skin with chill humidity and slicked the streets just wet enough to shine the asphalt into a dark mirror, reflecting the smeared red of stoplights like warning beacons. Uncommon Grounds was filled with night people in masks and smudging makeup sipping lattes with delicate fern leaves penciled in the foam, an acoustic version of the Monster Mash humming over the speakers. There was adrenaline pounding in Miles’ blood already, he didn’t need the caffeine, but he ordered a tall decaf and let the bitterness distract him.

Peter tore open three packets of a non-sucrose sugar-adjacent product with his teeth and poured the powder into his cup until it got cloudy. “I feel underdressed,” he said.

“We coulda come in costume,” Miles said, and then wished he hadn’t. “Fit right in.” He hauled his bag up on the table with a thump, and Peter eyed it.

“So, spill it. What’ve you got for me?”

“Okay.” Miles took a breath and rolled his shoulder, a reflexive movement. “Remember how I said my old roommate--”

“The fanboy.”

“--Yeah, him. Remember how he was working on something to help with the glitching?” Miles pulled one of the cuffs from his bag and laid it on the table. In the commercial light of the coffee shop it looked fake and impossible, like a prop from a low budget sci-fi TV show. “It’s a dimensional stabilizer. Should stop the zaps, at least.”

Peter looked at it with recognition and the cautious skepticism of someone comfortable and familiar with their pain, and he turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it, the hum that made your hands numb from almost imperceptible vibration after awhile. He didn’t ask _Does it work?_ because he knew, could feel it in his bones as Miles had. It would work. “Hell,” he said under his breath, impressed. “Ain’t that a thing.” Peter set the circlet of it back between them, equidistant on the table.

“I’ve got one too,” Miles said. “If it works, we won’t have to worry anymore.”

“About the glitching or the inconvenience,” Peter said. He knew. Despite bumbling through his personal life, Peter had always been canny-- Miles didn’t forget that, but he also didn’t remember it enough, and of course one of the facets of Peter, lain out beside ‘divorcee’ and ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘journalist’ was ‘former grad student’. Emotionally stupid, mentally sharp. “You’re not wearing yours.” It wasn’t a question.

Miles shook his head. “I just got it today. And I guess I didn’t want to do anything until I saw you.”

“To say goodbye?”

“To decide on it.” Miles could feel his heart in his chest, in his fingertips. He could feel the seat underneath him and Peter across from him and the barometric pressure outside; he could feel, and hear, his mother saying again and again, we don’t run from things, and he knew this wasn’t the right time. The right time would have been glorious, triumphant, after a battle, alive with the rush of being alive and together and a team; the right time would have been on Hanukkah or Christmas, in the steamy warmth of Peter’s kitchen or Aunt May’s when she was out of the room, full up on affection and easy familial comfort. It wasn’t the right time, but it was the only time there was. Miles understood that the choice was his. Whatever Peter wanted, whatever he felt, he would never back himself up to the edge of that precipice and leap from it, never take that risk, because Miles was the only thing he had left to lose.

“Well,” Peter said. “You should do whatever’s best for you.” Plainly, as if it were self-evident. His fingers closed around the edge of the table. “I’m falling apart anyway, but you shouldn’t hurt yourself if you don’t have to.”

“Maybe I have to,” Miles said.

It wasn’t slow, it wasn’t sudden. There was time enough, with clarion instinct and lightning reflexes, for Peter to lean away out of Miles’ reach, to get up or catch his hand or any of the thousand, million little ways of rejection that would have stopped him, but instead Peter let it happen; let him lean across the table, brushing cooling coffee cups aside, to curl his fingers around the back of Peter’s neck and cup his bristly cheek, let him push their mouths together, soft and chapped lips. Peter didn’t taste like anything, didn’t feel like anything except warm, his mouth slightly wet, and it wasn’t like in the movies, and for once the voice in his head was utterly silent, not instructing him how he should move, how he should be. There was just an awkward, good pressure that went on a beat too long, and then Peter shuddered into it and opened his mouth and kissed him, full and reactive and real; reached up to hold Miles’ wrist almost until it hurt, as if he could anchor himself there and keep from falling.

When they were done, he looked ruined. “Miles,” he said, and stopped, and ran his tongue across his lips, and he could find nothing else to say.

“I don’t want to stop seeing you,” Miles said, breathing it all out. “I don’t want to stop hanging with you and cooking with you and _being_ with you, even if it’s hard and it hurts and we can’t control it.”

Peter swallowed. “You’ll find someone else,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t have to be me.”

“I want it to be,” Miles said. “Did you find someone else? Did you ever move on, all the way, from the first person you loved?”

And even though he had invited it, even though he’d known the answer, it still hurt when it came. Peter looked at him, as brave and proud as he had ever been, and did not look away. “No,” he said.

“Is that why you don’t want me?” Peter said nothing. “Because I think you _do_ want it, Peter. You kissed me back.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Peter said. “You’re not-- Jesus, Miles, you were _fourteen_ when I met you. You have no idea how vulnerable you were.”

Miles was still leaned across the table; he couldn’t make himself lean away. “It’s not a lie,” he said. “It’s not an illusion. You didn’t trick me into loving you, you made it as hard as possible for anyone to, and I love you anyway, so don’t try to tell me it isn’t real.”

Peter let go of his wrist and buried his face in his own hands, hunched over in a supplicant’s lament. “I know it is,” he said. “I know.”

After a while the cafe’s stereo system went off and they listened to the rain against the window, and Miles knew that it was over.


	6. Me and You and the Elements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter is a lyric from "Sloppy Seconds" by Watsky, which is kind of the themesong of this fic.

Standing on the curb outside the cafe in the marshy rain gone midnight Peter looked as miserable as Miles had ever seen him, grey-faced and damp, uncomfortable with the autumn cold and the wet, uncomfortable inside himself, and a desperate unhappiness rose up in both of them. For as wrecked and ruined as that face was, Miles found himself staring into it, trying to commit it to memory, as though and in case it would be the last time. He wanted to hold onto everything, even the things that were as stunningly painful as this, as a punch to the head.

Peter hesitated several moments too long, opened his mouth, closed it again. When he breathed there was already a misty fog rising; they were on the cusp of a long, cold winter, icy winds rolling in from the bay. “Miles,” he said, with a careful, exhausted urgency, and when he paused again Miles expected him to fill up the silence with _it’s not you_ , or _I don’t think we should see each other anymore,_ some other cliche cribbed from a dozen doomed fictional romances, a placeholder sentence, something without real sentiment that you put there just to end it.

Instead he said, “All the good stuff-- you shouldn’t forget it. It’ll hurt for a while, maybe forever, but don’t let it go. When you close yourself off from everything you felt, that’s what kills you.” There was a glassy grief in his eyes, and Miles knew that Peter was looking through him, back into the past, where it was warmer; into days that were long gone, and never coming back. He swallowed thickly. “You showed me that,” he said. “So don’t let yourself forget it, ever, if I’m not around to remind you.”

He reached out, one last time, and gripped Miles’ shoulder; the bad one, though even in the wet and the rain there was no pain there, just the steady pressure of Peter’s strong hand and the weight of him there, and for a moment it almost seemed as though Peter was going to kiss him again. Then Miles said nothing, because every time he said the words he gave a part of them away, and Peter let go, and there was only the night left around him.

And Miles went home.

\---

Gwen had texted him back to meet her in Greenwich Village at a dive bar that sometimes incidentally, as a prelude to hard drinking, played hard music, so Miles bummed around town trying out alternate universe versions of familiar soda brands and attempting not to be too bored by the miracle of a different dimension by himself for a few hours, and then took the bus there after the sun had been down a while. The bar was in a basement, the sort of establishment with stairs set down into the sidewalk like you were descending into hell or the subway, wrought iron spiked railing rising up around it. The sizzling red-orange neon in the barred windows attracted fat white moths in the midsummer heat that stumbled into it drunkenly.

It had been a while since he’d seen Gwen. The pauses between their visits tended to drag long enough that every time he saw her she looked subtly different, older, which only served to remind him how young they’d been when it all started and how young he didn’t feel now, though of course you never felt it, that was the problem entirely. Now a good ten months on from their last visit, she was tall and ethereal and wild, and she loomed over him, though that might have been simply because when he walked in (and what kind of bar doesn’t even pretend to check your fake ID?) she was already on stage, helping her bandmates set up her drum kit and their amps. A spotlight was sort of crookedly turned on the platform and she stood in the silver pool of it, all lit up and radiant, decked out in her piercings and her belts and a tight band t-shirt, and for a moment he loved her again with a pure and perfect boyish ache.

She smiled at him and hopped off the stage. “Miles, hey!” As she sauntered over a tall redhead in a leather jacket as dark and slick as an oil spill peeled off from a knot of hipsters in faux-lumberjack couture near the bar to follow at her heels; Miles recognized the face of an old friend, younger and cleaner and unlined. Mary Jane Watson had a forest of stainless steel spikes on her jacket and a big brass belt buckle with a snarling tiger embossed on it and lipstick the color of danger. She was a bombshell. There would be no survivors.

 _Oh,_ Miles thought, watching the way she pressed in close to Gwen’s side, without actually touching. _Guess she_ was _your Mary Jane, after all_.

“Hey, Gwen,” he said, soft and fond. If this was the last time he would see her, too-- then good. He wanted to remember her like this, happy and smiling and in control, enjoying her real life.

Gwen bumped her elbow into MJ’s side. “MJ, this is my friend Miles,” she said. “The one I was telling you about. Miles, this is MJ.” As she glanced between them her look became pointed.

“Nice to finally meet you,” Miles said, holding out a hand for her to shake, and as he did so realized half hysterically that this was the only version of the infamous Mary Jane he’d _ever_ actually met, and probably the only one he ever would.

She shook it. Her long painted nails were like claws against the back of his hand. “Same,” she said, uncertain neutrality resolving into a relaxed smile. “Gwen wants you to do our new logo.”

“Really?” Miles asked. “First I’m hearing about it.”

“Yeah, well.” Gwen shrugged, crossing her arms over her chest. The look got more pointed, sharp enough to cut him. “You haven’t been around in a while, Miles.”

“What, and he doesn’t have a phone?”

Miles took his hand back and rolled with it. “I’m off the grid,” he said.

MJ nodded. “Radical.” In the background there was the cacophonous crash of someone else messing with Gwen’s drums. “Goddamn it. Okay, we’re up. Stick around awhile, yeah? Don’t be a stranger.” She trailed her fingers along the back of Gwen’s shoulder as she turned and marched off to attend to the disaster on stage, beckoning.

“You told her yet?” Miles asked.

“I’m going to,” Gwen said. She hugged herself a little tighter. “It just hasn’t been the right time, you know? But I want to. I think she’d get it.”

“She did for Peter,” Miles said. “The other her, anyway.”

The thrum of a single electric bass note plucked reverberated through the dusky room, cutting through the susurrus of voices and glasses clinking and meaningless bar chatter. “I have to go,” she said. “Catch you after the show?”

“For sure,” Miles said, gripping the strap of his bag hard enough to press the impression of rough fabric into his palm. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Gwen nodded. Concern and the dark of the bar shadowed her face, but this time, at least, she wasn’t looking at him like she already knew what it was. “For sure,” she echoed. “Meet me out back when we’re done.”

Miles sat at the bar on a wobbly stool so high that his sneakers didn’t touch the sticky flooring and chewed slowly through half a bowl of bar nuts while the music happened. What little lighting there was went all the way down and a man announced The Mary-Janes, who were opening for Rat Bastard, who were opening for Black Venom, and on and on, acts that Miles would never have heard of even if he’d been from here. A smattering of hoots and applause eventuated at every name, and then someone clicked a blush pink filter on the spotlight, and the band began to play. The drumming did, indeed, seem better as part of a set. Miles watched Gwen’s face, twisted in raw satisfaction as she lost herself to the moment, and MJ’s cherry lips, and he listened to her scream-sing a verse about kissing your dead boyfriend. It sounded like they were having fun, in the kind of very personal, very public way that the best music has.

He went outside again.

The alley behind the bar faced the back end of a hole in the wall restaurant and someone had set up tables out there, strings of softly glowing yellow ball lights that crosshatched between the buildings, closing him off from the sky. Miles leaned against the wall and smelled greasy food cooking, and after he’d stopped feeling the vibrations of the music through the brick the shabby access door opened and shut again behind Gwen. She’d brought him a bottle of craft beer with a blue moon on the label and he held it by the amber neck when he took it, watching her take a pull from her own that left a smear of dark lipstick across the glass.

“I told Peter I loved him,” he said.

Gwen stared at him briefly, took another drink. “Oh, Miles.”

“It was stupid.”

“Yeah, it was.” She folded one arm over her chest again, taking the time to roll that thought around, tasting it like the beer in her mouth. He could see her adding things up, understanding, and accepting without liking the full picture it made. “Didn’t I warn you about that?”

He laughed, because it was better than the alternative, and finally took a sip of his drink. It was bitter and foamy and strong, for beer, which he was given to understand wasn’t really that strong, in the scheme of things, but it didn’t make him feel like more of a man. “It wasn’t his fault,” Miles said. “I knew what was going to happen and I did it anyway.”

Not everything that was going to happen. He hadn’t known that Peter would kiss him back, or that it would hurt all the more because he had.

Gwen was still staring at him, not quite with pity but something unreadable. “My Peter became the Lizard because he was trying to keep up with me,” she said. “I mean, not _me_ me, he didn’t know I was Spider-Woman, but the… image of that. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to help people. He was _good_ , until he wasn’t, and I think he was afraid the whole time that he was going to become what he did.” She settled back against the wall as well, tipped her head up until her skull tapped the brick and the lights reflected in her eyes. “I could have told you,” she said, “that if you loved him like that he’d never forgive himself for it.”

Something sick churned Miles’ stomach. The beer wasn’t sitting well with him, but he took another gulp anyway, wondering if he’d like it more with repetition. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said. “It’s not-- I don’t see what’s so bad about it anyway. It’s not like we’re normal people where regular rules apply. I just got tired of waiting for it to go away.”

“Everybody has the capacity to be a monster,” Gwen said. She reached up to rub at the base of her neck with pale fingers, envisioning the shape of someone else’s pain. “I think nobody knows that like Peter does.”

“It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” Miles set his bottle on the edge of a dumpster and rifled through his bag, the dwindling reserve of supplies he might never need again. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Ganke made this thing…” He explained about the thing. He did not explain about how angry he’d been with Peter at first, simmering resentment crawling under his skin when he remembered everything they’d shared that Peter was giving up, even completely platonic with no strings attached. Miles could have learned to live without that kind of love, he thought, more easily than he could learn to live without Peter, but having willingly given him all the tools Peter needed to cut him out of his life, he couldn’t really complain.

And there were always strings attached, even if you didn’t think there were. Everything he’d done for Peter on some level had been selfish; had been about him, and how much he loved him, and how much he’d wanted to help him, and everything Peter had done with him had been because it made Peter happy to. This was how people used each other, unavoidable and transactionary, caught up in the webs of their lives and willingly entangled. If Peter needed space, he could have space, as much space as there possibly was with the dimensional stabilizer turned on, an anchorite walled up in his own universe to think and suffer alone.

If it hurt Miles’ heart to think of it, well, it wasn’t his business anymore.

Gwen flipped the cuff over in her hands, examined it from all angles. “This isn’t goodbye forever,” she said, strapping it on her wrist under a spiked band that made for a certain _don’t fuck with me_ fashion statement. “You’re acting like it is. All it does is give you a choice.”

Miles had to agree that she was right. Turn the stabilizer on and he could decide, with deliberate intention, when he would be open to the possibility of going where he was needed, if he was needed. “You ever kinda feel like there aren’t any real choices?” he asked.

She gestured to all of him, to all of her, to the alley and the world at large, to the endless star-scattered sky. “All you have are choices,” Gwen said. “That’s why Peter B. is a washed up divorcee and your Peter died a hero and mine died a monster, and why I’m alive instead of him. There’s a universe where it’s 1939 forever and one with giant robots. If you make a bad decision, do that, fine. But own it. Both of you need to own it. That’s all there is.” She touched his face, a quick barely-there pressure of her fingers to his cheek, and then she was gone.

“And if I can’t?”

“Then you need to make the other choice, and move on.”

\---

Junior year at NYU, Miles finally moved out of the dorms and into a place that was really his own. Sure, he only really owned part of it, the rest of the loft a joint partnership with four other students from the college of arts who wanted a place to crash and play loud music at midnight where nobody was going to care if they got paint on the weather stripped floor, and sure it was hideously expensive on a student’s drowning in debt budget; sure he’d eaten nothing but 99 cent ramen and hot bologna sandwiches for the last six months. It was worth it to feel like he had roots again somewhere, finally. He had a bed and a wall all to himself, and his roommates didn’t care at all if he filled the apartment with the smell of paint aerosol throwing up the designs he could never put on a street there.

That fall his father helped him disassemble the drafting table from his room back home and haul it several neighborhoods over, up a claustrophobic staircase that echoed with the ghosts of a hundred years of tenants on every footstep, to put it back together in a sunny corner of the new loft by a big window. With that central installation gone, his childhood room felt empty and unrecognizable for all it still held the other hallmarks of receded youth, possessions that seemed to belong to someone else. He slept in the same slightly too-small twin bed one last time and in the morning hugged his mother and promised to keep coming home every weekend, he was still only a train ride away. He was twenty. It had been two years since he’d last seen Peter.

At first he hadn’t worn the cuff, stubborn and still smarting, and then the arthritic spasmodic technicolor pain of the glitching had become too much and the last time he’d visited Gwen, in _her_ new apartment, he’d wound up coughing a mouthful of foamy saliva streaked with blood into the kitchen sink while MJ thumped him on the back, and he’d decided to cool it for a while. Give his cells time to repair themselves, his mutating DNA the opportunity to patch itself up, his heart the space to heal.

For two years he’d kept his head down and did the work, settling into the routine of school and vigilante activity, patrolling neighborhoods at night until all of New York truly became his backyard leaving criminals pinned to walls as his own personal tag, balancing a part time job washing floors and counters at a corner deli with freelance artwork as a side hustle and trying not to get so burned out on school assignments that he forgot he truly enjoyed drawing. In return for a promise of content oversight Ganke had gotten one of his tech buddies to code him a website that now hosted an independent project visually chronicling the adventures of Spider-Man that he was calling, against everybody’s best advice, “Web Comix”. The pages weren’t very accurate to his true life, really, but to be fair, neither had True-Life Tales of Spider-Man been, and at least Miles’ art had style and a kind of secret truth to it, buried way underneath the cartoony lies about his personal identity.

He liked to pretend he didn’t still think about Peter, but that was a lie too, and one that was mostly ineffective even in his own head. He’d brought the framed newspaper clipping with him from place to place, and now it hung over his bed instead of his desk. In his comics Spider-Man had a boyfriend, tall and blonde and nerdy, a graduate student in Microbiology. It was a compelling fantasy.

And Miles went out with his roommates and his school friends on the weekends, and drank craft beer at parties, and sometimes he thought about kissing girls, kissing boys; but the thought stayed a thought, and he kept his hands to himself. It was a choice. Someday, maybe, he would choose something else.

The moment of truth, when it came, didn’t feel like a decision at all. It felt inevitable, as inevitable as radionuclear decay, as photosynthesis, an unavoidable elemental reaction. Incite these circumstances once, twice, a thousand times, the result would always be the same.

It was a Saturday and Miles was sketching, penciling out in a loose blocky way the next couple of pages wherein Spider-Man fought Kraven the Hunter, a man who thought that real leopard print was a reasonable fashion choice in the 2020s, and then went out for hot dogs. As always when he worked there wasn’t a thought in his head, just the feel of it, a blank comfortable emptiness into which his subconscious poured visions of figures, light and shape and color, so it was a rude shock to find an old shiver running like ice water down his spine, souring in the pit of his stomach.

Miles felt a deep and sudden fear crawling over him like the legs of many insects, prickling at his skin. He felt his heart lurch and drop, felt a phantom-limb disconnected sort of pain that writhed in his belly and tightened around his throat, felt his lungs squeeze as though fighting for air, and he knew none of it was his, the horror, the panic, even as it faded into a hopeless, heavy acceptance. The disembodied distress was a beacon blazing across worlds. He felt the weight of someone else’s despair through the spider sense, the same way he heard people screaming for help a block away in Brooklyn, and knew that they were going to die, whoever was calling to him, and knew that they knew, and had reconciled with it.

 _Miles_.

It wasn’t a conscious thought, just the shape and feeling of his name-- less his name, the essence of him, a heartache, and Miles understood that the call wasn’t intentional. He reached down, scrabbling desperate for his ankle, and hit the off switch on the stabilizer, fingers slipping with clammy fear sweat on the plastic, because now the fear had also become his own.

The universe opened up to accept him, and he fell.

They were in what had once been a warehouse. The high rusting iron roof had caved open along one corner and the rain was coming in, leaving treacherous puddles filmed with a rainbow chemical skin. The hulks of old abandoned machines, some covered in tarps the wind pulled at, some naked and rotting, loomed out of the darkness. Miles could hear the rain, and the whirr of gears, and someone’s wet, labored breathing as it struggled near an end.

Peter was suspended off his feet in midair, hung by the chains of metal arms, steel tentacles more dangerous than rubber wrapped around his chest, binding his arms, looped like a noose around his neck. His mask was off and his face was a ruddy, ugly purple with blood, chin tipped up, eyes going glassy, held there by a short, portly, white-haired version of Otto Octavius-- and Miles was in the wreckage of the burned-out collider again, watching kingpin bash the other Peter Parker’s skull in like a rotten pumpkin. He was on the roof of Aunt May’s house, watching his uncle topple over backward, the gunshot still ringing in his ears. Whatever Peter had done, whatever had happened between them, he was still beloved. Miles couldn’t let Spider-Man die. He couldn’t let _Peter_ die.

“This has gone on long enough, Peter,” Octavius said, creaking voice smoothed over a soft Germanic accent. “You are old. I am old, but my mind is superior. It must end.”

Miles was behind him, exposed without his suit, and for the barest instant Peter looked over the man’s shoulder, saw him-- and his eyes watered and closed, a tired smile pulling at his swollen lips. “Yeah,” he croaked, with the last of his breath, as Miles went translucent, the apparition vanishing. “It’s done. I’m done.” His body went slack in the coils one final time.

“What’s up, Doc?” Miles said, and he plunged his hand into the Gordian knot of wires and tubes and fuses at the base of Octavius’ spine.

Metal shrieked, popped, exploded. With the short jolting shock he let burst from his fingers there was the asphalt smell of burning rubber, and something else sparked, setting off a sparkler of hot light. Miles made a fist, grabbed whatever he could of fuselage and wire, and _pulled,_ hard, coming away with a handful of mechanical gore, hydraulic oil gushing out in steady, vital pulses over his hand and forearm. Octavius screamed, injured and affronted, and his many arms released their prey, whipping around jerky and frenetic, rapidly losing pressure and strength; when they withdrew Peter dropped to the floor and remained there, curled up around himself and hacking the pain and phlegm from his lungs. Miles couldn’t worry about him, not yet-- now he was occupied with the scuttling footwork of dancing out of the range of those grasping, snapping claws, remembering split-second in the thick of it how his webshooters worked and sticking each extra arm to itself, to a wall, the floor, anything that kept Octavius tied down and harmless.

He was an old man, and small, and his mechanics now badly wanted fixing, and the fight was over in minutes. Miles plastered him to the wall with a thick sheeting of web and made sure to cover his mouth before going to attend to Peter.

Even invisible Miles’ footsteps sounded very loud against the metal and brick of the dilapidated building, and as he approached-- as form and color bed back into his outline --Peter hacked through another burst of wheezy coughing and rolled over onto his back. “Nice one,” he rasped. “Little cliche, but good improv. You been workin’ on your quips?”

“It was dumb,” Miles said. He crouched down beside Peter’s head, not wanting to kneel in the mud and the industrial grime, and reached out to touch his cheek with shaking fingers; the color was slowly coming back to normal there. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit.” Peter coughed again and sounded somehow, impossibly, worse. He sounded very tired, face still twisted into a rictus of pain, but he was alive, and that was enough for relief to sing the tension from Miles’ stiff muscles. He was alive, and every hopeless wanting feeling was coming back. “What are you doing here, Miles?”

The secondhand pain and fear had faded, leaving a hungover, carved-out emptiness, a jittery adrenaline high that knocked his bones together. Whatever fear remained was all his own. “It felt like you needed me,” Miles said, and he brushed a fall of sweat-clumped hair from Peter’s damp face.

Peter looked at him, at last. Opened his eyes and really looked at him, for the first time. Grimacing with every small movement, he rocked himself upright, catching hold of his bent knees to hold himself from falling over again, and when Miles put a hand on the small of his back to steady him he didn’t fight it. Miles thought that half-dead as he was he probably shouldn’t have been moving so much, but then again, they were both of them hard to kill. “I thought--” he started, stopped, tried again. “It’s all true, you know,” he said. “That shit about your life going before your eyes when you’re dying. We don’t have to talk about this now.”

It wasn’t the right time, or a good time, but it was the only time there was. “I think we do,” Miles said. “You thought about me?”

Peter took a breath. He leaned, perhaps deliberately, into Miles’ hand. “I’m always-- thinking about you. I love you. I’m sorry that I didn’t say it back then.” It sounded like a confession, the wrong kind, and Miles had heard the words before, and he knew it didn’t mean anything without the context of the words around them.

“But I’m too young,” he said, confirming. “I’m still just a kid.”

“It’s not just that,” Peter told him. They were both sitting, now, on an equal level, and Miles tried not to feel the cold and the discomfort. “This shit scares me, Miles. What happened with MJ… what happened with _Gwen_ \--”

“I know what happened with Gwen,” Miles gently interrupted him, letting Peter choke himself off with what might have been another cough or a sob. He knew as much as he could know, anyway, just from reading the sober clinical after-the-fact reporting online years later: Captain Stacy’s daughter dead, thrown from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge by a modern day monster. It couldn’t give him the gunshot crack of a neck snapping, the limp liquid weight of a body immobile forever in his arms. He imagined, as he had the first time he’d learned of it, holding his mother that way, his own Gwen, Peter-- “So what happened with MJ?” he asked, quieter. “What really happened, Peter?”

Peter laughed, mirthlessly. “You mean, why couldn’t I get her back?”

“Yeah. I guess I do mean that.”

Too weak to really move but desperate to escape, Peter rolled away from him, from his touch and his presence and his comfort, struggling back up onto his feet and swaying uncertainly. “I left her!” he said, nearly shouting, drawing from a well of pain deeper than that of crushed wind pipes and vocal cords. “That’s what happened. _I_ left _her_. I broke her heart because I got scared, and I couldn’t handle it. All our fights were always my fault. When I came back it was different, too much time had passed, I don’t know, maybe it was just that I left at all, and after that she couldn’t love me the same way, because I fucked it up. I fuck up, and I fuck up, and I fuck up, and I keep fucking up, and no matter what I do I can’t stop. I broke Gwen and I broke her and I couldn’t… fuck, Miles, I can’t break you too, I can’t be responsible for that.”

Miles, who was sick of people literally or figuratively talking down to him, got up as well. Peter was pacing, stalking, an animal caged by his own fears, and Miles didn’t want to get too close to him just then, in case it set off some other burst of regret. “I’m not scared,” he said. “You didn’t ever do anything wrong to me.”

“But I might,” Peter said. “Given my track record I will, and you don’t deserve that. You don’t want it, even if you think you do.”

“Don’t you try and tell me what I want!” Heedless of anything but his love and his frustration and his anger, at Peter and at the universe and everybody, Miles took a reckless step towards him. He could feel something electric crackling under his skin, in his blood. “What do _you_ want?” he demanded.

“I don’t know!”

“Can you tell me you don’t want me? Tell me, Peter, and I’ll go away. Or we can forget the whole thing. I’ll be your brother. Partners in fighting crime. Just tell me you don’t want me, and mean it, and it’ll be over.” He forced himself to breathe. They were very close, close enough that he could see himself in Peter’s eyes, see the grey in his hair and the lines on his face, the stubble he’d aged into, the old break in his nose, every small scar. “But if you can’t, I’m never gonna stop. I’m never gonna leave you again. I’m not scared, and I’m not running from you.”

“It’s not that you’re young,” Peter said. “It’s not that I don’t… it’s not that you aren’t amazing and incredible and worth it, it’s that I’m old and getting older.” He grinned weakly, trying to make his face do something it didn’t want to. “These dashing good looks aren’t going to last forever, and then what’ve you got? A wreck."

“I don’t care,” Miles said at once. “You think I haven’t spent, like, half a decade thinking about all the reasons this wouldn’t work? None of them matter to me. It’s been you, Peter, this whole time it was you, and even when you were fucking up I never wanted anyone else. It was my choice.” Another breath. “I told you that.”

Peter went quiet, as though all the yelling and the fire in him had been used up in one short burst and smothered by Miles’ own emotion, but Miles knew there was still passion there, if you dug deep and hard and determined enough to find it; he’d found it once before. The still wind whipped at Peter’s hair and he remembered-- they remembered together --the impossible wind of another place, Peter backlit by the swirling double helix colors of the collider as it broke reality into a million fractal pieces, before Miles had dropped him, which had been no more a real leap of faith than falling off your chair was, without conscious intention. It was dark here, in the now. All the light, the only light, was inside of them.

When Peter kissed him, this time, it was like it was in the movies, fireworks and heat and his heart exploding, with the rain coming down on the roof around them. There was blood in his mouth and on his lips and his face was too warm, and his hands were shaking, and Miles felt like he was falling a very long way up, and he didn’t care at all.

“I don’t deserve this,” Peter said against his lips, somewhere in the middle of it, and Miles held his face in his hands and kissed him quiet again, sloppy and unskilled and not caring one bit about inelegance or embarrassment either.

“Stop saying that,” Miles said eventually. “It’s not just for you. It’s for _us_.”

And filled up with the realization that there was an _us_ now, that he wasn’t the only Spider-Man anymore, Peter let his arms fall around Miles’ waist to draw him in, holding him there, where they both wanted to be.

\---

Late in that night, so late it had begun to be early, Miles woke up in Peter’s bed. They probably should have gone to a hospital first, but people of their proclivities weren’t hospital sorts of people-- hospitals asked questions. So instead they went back to Peter’s new apartment, which was now and had been for a while an old apartment, and Peter poured himself a half cup of the holiday wine and watched a rerun of the local news while Miles called in an anonymous tip about where the NYPD could find an escaped criminal apprehended. Slowly his breathing had become even and strong, less wheezy, the color coming to his face in a less deadly way, and Miles had known that the worst was over. They went to bed.

When Miles woke up it had stopped raining, and through the thinning clouds a haze of grey predawn light had begun to turn the bedroom monochrome. At first he didn’t understand what had roused him, because his limbs and mind were still heavy with sleep, but then Peter’s phone juddered again where it rested on the nightstand, beaming a rectangle of brighter white light against the ceiling. Not snooping-- though this was a safe place for it, he thought with a smile, if he’d wanted to --he reached a lanky arm over the hillock lump Peter made in the bedsheets beside him and went to shut it off, sure that whatever thing anyone was texting him about could wait. He’d earned his rest.

The texts were uninteresting. Miles clicked through them and the phone’s lock screen transposed itself over his usual background, a photo he’d taken himself. The sunlight in the picture was too harsh, but it lit on the endless shining ocean and the face of a young man that Peter had loved, even then.

He put the phone back and felt Peter stirring, slow and sleepy, disturbed by the movement. “‘S okay,” he whispered, soft and soothing. “Go back to sleep, Pete.”

Only half awake at best Peter slid back under, eyes closed tight but instinctively moving to shift towards him, opening his arms to drape one over Miles’ side, and Miles let him draw him in; he lay his cheek on Peter’s shoulder and listened to his heart beating there until he could feel his own heart in his chest beating with it. It wasn’t perfect, because it was real life, and in the morning all the messy complications would seep in again, creeping up with the knowledge that he couldn’t stay for long.

But Peter loved him. And even if somehow quantum entanglement or whatever other weird science never opened up infinity and brought them together again, it would have been worth it.

This, just this, would have been enough.

\---

Ganke Lee was awake at four in the morning pouring a five hour energy into his thermos of espresso when the text came, the vibration nearly making his phone jump off the edge of the table. He’d gone to the computer lab in the hopes that it would keep him from falling asleep after a forty-eight hour pre-exam marathon cram session, but instead it was just sort of making him feel like he could taste colors. Or maybe that was the caffeine. Either way a change in location hadn’t helped, and he was glad for any distraction that didn’t involve advanced Calculus.

The text was from Miles, which was a nice surprise. It wasn’t so much that they’d stopped talking as they’d both gotten extremely busy, but even in Cambridge he still had a Spider-Man t-shirt he repped around campus, and they knew better than anyone-- Miles knew better than anyone --that distance couldn’t dampen true feelings.

There was a link to an Instagram photo, obviously elaborately orchestrated. Two Spider-Men hung from someplace very high up, upside down with their masks pushed up around their noses, kissing like people kissed in the movies-- all tongue and reckless honeymooner enthusiasm. _This one’s not a secret anymore_ , Miles’ text read. Ganke grinned. They looked happy, he thought, smiling against each other, wrapped up in front of the whole of their city.

He already knew the rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you have it, every headcanon I've got about Peter B. Parker and Miles Morales making it work. I don't know if I'll write anything else for this ship, but if I do it will be because this small community has been so amazing to me. Thank you again to everyone who stuck around this long, and especially to everyone who left me such kind comments.
> 
> I love you all.


End file.
